Energy-efficient and secure in-network storage and retrieval for WSNs: an adaptive approach

Storage and retrieval of data in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been found to be challenging issues in recent studies. The two principal approaches used in almost all proposed schemes in this field are Centralized and Decentralized. Many investigations have considered the security and communication issues in centralized schemes where a central node exists as the sink and all collected data are sent to it to be processed or the central node provides access to the possible users. In decentralized systems, all nodes are equally responsible for the duties of the central node in centralized approaches. In cases where sensors cannot transmit data immediately, which is usually the case in distributed approaches, in-network storage and retrieval is an alternative with its own security and communication issues stemming from the properties of energy sensitive sensors. In this paper, a semi-centralized scheme is introduced that is based on a number of traditional techniques, namely, clustering, symmetric and asymmetric key-management, and threshold secret sharing. The proposed scheme provides an energy-efficient and secure in-network storage and retrieval that could be applied to WSNs. A predictive method is proposed to adaptively determine the proper parameters for the threshold secret sharing technique. Confidentiality, dependability, and integrity of the sensed data are enhanced in a distributed manner with fairly low communication and computation costs. Simulations were utilized to illustrate the effect of several network parameters on energy consumption and to come up with optimization recommendations for the parameters of the proposed secret sharing scheme.