Key Schemes for Security Enhanced TEEN Routing Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), hierarchical routing protocol is commonly used for energy efficiency. In particular, the TEEN (Threshold sensitive Energy Efficient sensor Network) protocol is used widely as a basic clustered multihop routing protocol. However, energy efficient routing protocols without proper security suffer from many security vulnerabilities. Hence, in this paper, we propose a hybrid key scheme specially for the TEEN protocol: a symmetric key scheme for the intracluster and a public key scheme for the intercluster. The simulation results show that network lifetime of the proposed hybrid key scheme decreases about 8% than the TEEN protocol and about 4% compared with the TEEN protocol with symmetric key scheme. On the other hand, a hybrid key scheme provides better probability of successful transmission than that of the symmetric key scheme.