International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

Volume 2013 (2013), Article ID 565076, 3 pages

http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/565076

Editorial

Secure and Energy-Efficient Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks

Anfeng Liu,¹ Laurence T. Yang,² Motoki Sakai,³ and Mianxiong Dong⁴

¹School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China

²Department of Computer Science, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, NS, Canada, B2G 2W5

³School of Symbiotic Systems Science and Technology, Fukushima University, Fukushima 960-1296, Japan

⁴School of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of Aizu, Aizuwakamatsu 965-8580, Japan

Received 12 August 2013; Accepted 12 August 2013

Copyright © 2013 Anfeng Liu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a kind of multihop and self-organizing networks formed by the way of wireless communication and composed by a large number of low-cost microsensor nodes deployed in the monitoring area. The sensor nodes cooperate to perceive and acquire the process and transmit the perceived object information in the network covering within the geographical area and finally send the information to the sink. In the recent decade, with the rapid development of various kinds of key technology in WSNs, they are widely applied to many especial environments, such as, military defense, environment detection, biological health, and disaster-relief work. Due to the limited computing ability, battery capacity, and storage capacity of sensor nodes, energy-efficient data collection became a nonnegligible research issue in WSNs. Also the open architecture in receiving data and transmitting data of WSNs is vulnerable to various security attacks during the data collection process. These two fundamental issues motivate us to have this special issue addressing the recent advances which are mentioned in Table 1 on security and energy-efficient data collection in WSNs.

Table 1: The main content of secure and energy-efficient data collection researches in WSNs.

The main research fields
The main content in current years

key management, encryption, and authentication
Hierarchical key management of sensor network [1], lightweight, and strong security key agreement [2].

Secure routing
Multipath security routing protocol [3], hierarchical sensor network security routing protocol [4].

Secure data aggregation
Syntactic aggregation and cryptographic aggregation [5]; use the watermark rather than PH data fusion technology to achieve security [6].

Secure localization
Hierarchical sensor network security positioning [7], lightweight security localization method [8].

Privacy protection
Data oriented privacy protection, contextual privacy [9], source-location privacy, footprint privacy, and communication privacy [10].

Energy-efficiency routing
Hierarchy and clustering routing [11].

Energy-efficiency MAC protocol
The MAC protocol based on CSMA/FDMA/CSMA [12].

In response to this call for papers, we have received a total of 36 high-quality submissions, and 13 papers have been selected for publication after a rigorous review process due to the space limit. The papers in this special issue are divided into three thematic groups as follows.

The first set of the seven papers emphasizes the security technology with a series of key agreement protocol, encryption, authentication, and trust scheme to solve the special security issues. According to the current researches in security technology in Table 1, the seven papers are significant for the improvement of the security of the network. “A hybrid authenticated group key agreement protocol in wireless sensor networks” by Y. Li et al. proposed an AGKA protocol which reduced the high cost public-key operations at the sensor side and replaced them with efficient symmetric-key based operations. In “Efficient and secure routing protocol based on encryption and authentication for wireless sensor networks” by J. Zhou, the author aimed to perform a secure routing protocol based on encryption and authentication which encrypted all communication packets and authenticated the source nodes and the BS. “Trust management scheme based on D-S evidence theory for wireless sensor network” by R. Feng et al. proposed a trust management scheme based on revised Dempster-Shafer (D-S) evidence theory. “An improved trust model based on interactive ant algorithms and its applications in wireless sensor networks” by Y. Pan et al. improved the Marmol et al.’s ant algorithm based trust model. “Low mismatch key agreement based on wavelet-transform trend and fuzzy vault in body area network” by Y. Wu et al. introduces the security on the body area network with lightweight symmetric cryptography. “Noncommutative lightweight signcryption for wireless sensor networks” by L. Gu et al. has proposed a braid-based signcryption scheme and developed a key establishment protocol for wireless sensor networks. “A cross-layer security scheme of web services-based communications for IEEE 1451 sensor and actuator networks” by J. Wu et al. dealt with the requirements, of authentication, integrity, confidentiality and availability.

The second set of the three papers focuses on how to improve the network’s energy efficiency and prolong the lifetime of the network within the security assurance. “An energy-efficient key predistribution scheme for secure wireless sensor networks using eigenvector” by S. J. Choi et al. proposes a new robust key predistribution scheme reducing the overhead requirement of secure connectivity and energy consumption. In “An energy-efficient cyclic diversionary routing strategy against global eavesdroppers in wireless sensor networks” by J. Ren et al. proposed an energy-efficient cyclic diversionary routing (CDR) scheme against global eavesdroppers for preserving location privacy and maximizing lifetime of wireless sensor networks. “Energy-efficiency of cooperative communication with guaranteed E2E reliability in WSNs” by D. Zhang and Z. Chen addressed the energy efficiency of cooperative communication in WSNs.

The last set of the rest mainly aims at the issues or the way of data collection. According to Table 1, the researches about secure data aggregation start in “A secure and efficient data aggregation framework in vehicular sensing networks” by S. Du et al. which introduced a basic aggregation scheme which could aggregate the data and the message authentication codes by using syntactic aggregation and cryptographic aggregation. A work that used a low-cost, reliable, and microchip-based wireless transmission solution to real-time collect earthquake data across local and wide areas is in “Real-time seismic data acquisition via a paired ripple transmission protocol” by J.-L. Lin et al. Besides, “Constructing a CDS-based network backbone for data collection in wireless sensor networks” by X. Kui et al. investigates the problem of constructing an energy balanced CDS to effectively preserve the energy of nodes in order to extend the network lifetime in data collection.

Compared with the recent researches in Table 1, all 13 papers in this special issue represent the spirit of innovation and important leaps in this field. They improve the performance in security and energy efficiency in data collection in WSNs and could be a guide and cornerstone to the future work.

Acknowledgments

The guest editor thanks all the authors who have contributed their time and effort submitting their outstanding works in response to the call for papers, regardless of whether their works have been published in this special issue or not on account of the space limitations. The guest editors are also grateful to all the reviewers for their valuable suggestions to the authors on improving the issues and presentation of their papers.

Anfeng Liu

Laurence T. Yang

Motoki Sakai

Mianxiong Dong

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