| Abstract: | Innovative and emerging developments in sensor networks are proven to be the backbone for real‐time applications such as satellite communications, military and border area surveillance systems, health care systems, traffic monitoring systems, seismic and underwater monitoring systems, and agriculture and habitat environment systems. Coverage and clustering techniques enable the sensor network to operate in group‐based and region‐based communication and thus save the node energy. Energy‐efficient protocols save the node energy and increase the network life cycle in a resource‐constrained sensor network. Cluster head (CH) node manages and controls the operations such as network topology, coverage area, and routing paths (multi‐paths and fault‐tolerant paths) of the network. In this paper, we present deterministic K‐means secure coverage clustering (K‐SCC) with periodic authentication. The proposed protocol uses coverage clustering technique with periodic authentication between the CH node and sensor nodes to establish the secure channel in the network. Maximum cover of K nodes is maintained in the secure coverage cluster to achieve authenticated communication between the sensor nodes in the network. The proposed K‐SCC protocol is compared with the existing protocols such as deterministic‐SCC and random‐SCC protocols. Simulation results indicate that the proposed K‐SCC protocol achieves an average of 84% coverage ratio (cluster/sensor node ratio) as compared with 62% coverage ratio in the existing SCC protocols. Simulations also indicate that the proposed K‐SCC protocol consumes 20% less energy as compared with the existing SCC protocol. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
