A multi-objective secure routing method for wireless sensor network

The wireless sensor network is a wireless network of self-organized sensors that are distributed at intervals. These sensors are used to group measurements of specific physical quantities or environmental conditions such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion, or pollutants at various locations. Energy efficiency to extend a wireless sensor network's lifetime should be considered in all network design areas, including hardware and software. Wireless sensor networks may be used in critical applications and transmit sensitive data, so they need methods to secure the data. Secure routing in wireless sensor networks is vital due to the need for data confidentiality, integrity, energy efficiency, authentication, and resilience against attacks. It ensures sensitive data remains private, prevents tampering, optimizes energy usage, verifies node authenticity, and defends against attacks. This paper presents a secure routing method in wireless sensor networks. In the proposed method, due to the nodes' processing limitations and to ensure the security of the exchanged messages, the lightweight columnar transposition cipher method is used. The routing process is done hop by hop, and the next hop is selected based on the parameters of remaining energy, distance to the base station, and node traffic. The proposed routing method is implemented by MATLAB and compared with SMEER and KID-SASR methods. The simulation results show a reduction of end-to-end delay of 50% and 38%, reduction of energy consumption of 39% and 20%, reduction of packet loss rate, and increased number of live nodes by 66% and 59% compared to SMEER and KID-SASR.