A UAV-assisted CH election framework for secure data collection in wireless sensor networks

Abstract With the advance of UAV-related technologies, UAV-assisted wireless communications such as UAV-assisted coverage extension, UAV-assisted relaying and UAV-assisted data distribution and collection are gathering a lot of interests from government and industry fields. More specifically, the UAV-assisted data distribution and collection is implemented as a UAV-based WSN (Wireless Sensor Network). In the UAV-based WSN, a CH (Cluster Head) plays a crucial role such as data collection from members, data transfer toward a UAV and data distribution from the UAV to its members. Due to the role of a CH, many attackers try to make their compromised nodes CHs. In the general CH election framework, since each node determines a CH role by itself, compromised nodes declare themselves as a CH regardless of their disqualification. Generally, a compromised CH consumes much more energy than a normal CH because it keeps fulfilling the CH role to deliver corrupted messages to the sink greedily. Inspired by this phenomenon, we propose a UAV-assisted CH election framework which collects residual energy of nodes, and employs them for electing new CHs and excluding the lowest energy nodes from CH candidates. Simulation results show that our framework outperforms the general CH election framework even when the number of compromised nodes is large. Concerning the CH election period, our framework provides better security and performance than the general CH election framework with a short CH election period. Besides, the variation of node compromise time had no impact on our framework’s superiority to the general CH election framework. Another simulation results show that the increase of UAV tour frequency enhances both security and performance of our framework. Our CH election framework is easily applied to a network of IoT devices because the IoT network also demands clustering for energy and data management efficiency. Our future work item is applying as many other CH election schemes as possible to our framework and comparing their security and performance.