Selective and secure over-the-air programming for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The growing range of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications, their long-life and large-scale design, as well as various deployment fields necessitate the feasibility of remote maintenance and reprogramming of in-situ sensor nodes. The network-wide dissemination of program code is not appropriate in every WSN due to the heterogeneity of sensor hardware, the diversity of sensing tasks, and the event and location dependency of software. Thus, a flexible and group-wise selective Over-The-Air Programming (OTAP) is required in these scenarios. Furthermore, securing the OTAP protocol is imperative in order to prevent unauthorized and malicious reprogramming attempts. In this paper, we introduce SenSeOP, a selective and secure OTAP protocol for WSNs. For this purpose, the proposed protocol uses multicast transfer supported by asymmetric cryptography. We evaluate the performance of our approach in real testbeds, compare it with state-of-the-art protocols, and show that this approach enables efficient and reliable wireless reprogramming. © 2012 IEEE.