King Saud University

College of Computer and Information Sciences

Computer Engineering Department

Design and Performance Analysis of a Security

algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Prepared by
Eng. Saad A. AL-Swailem

Supervised by
Dr. Sami Al-Wakeel

Submitted In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of

Master of Science in Computer Engineering at the College of Computer
and Information Sciences, King Saud University Riyadh, 2007

Riyadh
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
1428H / 2007G

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Abstract

Wireless Sensor networks (WSN) consist of small nodes with sensing,

computation, and wireless communications capabilities and expected to play an
essential role in the upcoming age of pervasive computing. Due to their constraints in
computation, memory, power resources, and its deployment in unattended and hostile
environments, individual sensors are vulnerable to security compromise and
susceptible to physical capture. Furthermore, using wireless communications makes
security a challenge in these networks Error! Reference source not found..
In this thesis, a path redundancy based security algorithm (PRSA) is proposed
to enhance reliability and improve routing security in sensor network. The algorithm
uses alternative routing paths for each data transmission call. These paths can be
either disjoint or braided where one or more nodes is the same among these paths.
PRSA defines the alternative path by replacing those nodes that are considered active
adversary in the initial least cost routing path. Such nodes are identified by the
algorithm using a set of parameters such as power threshold, number of hops, source
node HELLO messages, and a combination of node ID number and power. To
enhance security further, PRSA allows sensor node data to be sent on the defined
routing paths using various transmission modes including, round robin, redundant and
selective modes Error! Reference source not found..
PRSA performance is studied and analyzed for a network with shortest path
routing protocol. The performance measures include energy dissipation, transmission
cost, complexity cost, throughput in terms of number of successful packet
transmissions, and average packet transmission delay for a network that is comprised
with one of typical sensor network attacks such as Spoofing, selective forwarding,
sinkhole, Sybil, Wormholes, and Hello flood attacks.

Keywords
Sensor Network Security, WSN Security Algorithm, WSN Performance.