A distributed scheme for securing middle-tier multicast in hierarchical sensor networks

Hierarchical architectures are more and more widely adopted for organizing wireless sensor networks. In such architectures, middle-tier nodes take important roles, and preventing a malicious node from impersonating a middle-tier node and injecting falsified messages becomes critical. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient, distributed scheme to secure the multicast messages from the middle-tier nodes. Our scheme does not require a priori knowledge about the hierarchical relation between middletier nodes and lowest-tier nodes, and is adaptive to changes of this relation. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate our scheme, and the results show that the scheme is energy efficient.