Light weight authentication protocol for WSN using ECC and hexagonal numbers

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a spatially distributed network. It contains many numbers of distributed, self-directed, small, battery powered devices called sensor nodes or motes. In recent years the deployment of WSN in various application domains are growing in a rapid pace as with the upcoming boom of Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Everything (IoE). However, the effectiveness of the WSN deployment is restricted due to the constrained computation and power source. Hence, many researchers have been proposing new approaches and models to improve the efficiency of the domain specific WSN deployment procedures. Though, many research communities addressing various issues in WSN deployment, still the privacy and security of such networks are susceptible to various network attacks. Thus, it is necessary to practice different models for authentication and privacy preservation in a highly dynamic resource constrained WSN environment to realize the effectiveness and efficiency of the deployment. Hence, this paper addressing an authentication scheme that can reduce energy consumption without compromising on security and privacy. In order to provide a light weight authentication mechanism, this paper proposing an authentication mechanism for WSN deployment by combining the features of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Hexagonal numbers. The feature of ECC is used to reduce the key size and the effectiveness of generating hexagonal numbers is used for minimizing the energy consumption in a resource constrained WSN environment. The results of the proposed approach are evaluated with the different authentication models and the results were indicating that the proposed approach can perform better than the other approaches.