SCARP: Secure Congestion Aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks sense various kinds of information, process them locally and communicate it to the outside world via satellite or Internet. In the near future, sensor networks will play a major role in collecting and disseminating information from the fields where ordinary networks are unreachable for various environmental and strategical reasons. Hence it is increasingly likely that sensors will be shared by multiple applications and gather heterogeneous data of different priorities. With such concentration on wireless sensor networks, vital issues like security and congestion control are to be taken care of. We propose Secure Congestion Aware Routing protocol (SCARP), a protocol designed for mitigating congestion by dedicating a portion of network to forward high-priority traffic primarily and also satisfies the major security properties like data authentication, data secrecy, replay protection, freshness with low energy consumption which are the major factors affecting the wireless sensor networks. Keywords-Wireless sensor networks; Routing; Congestion control; Data security; Energy efficiency