A Data Transmission Approach Based on Ant Colony Optimization and Threshold Proxy Re-encryption in WSNs

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become increasingly popular due to the rapid growth of the Internet of Things. As open wireless transmission media are easy to attack, security is one of the primary design concerns for WSNs. Current solutions consider routing and data encryption as two isolated issues, providing incomplete security. Therefore, in this paper, we divide the WSN communication process into a data path selection phase and a data encryption phase. We propose an improved transmission method based on ant colony optimization (ACO) and threshold proxy re-encryption for WSNs, and we named it as ACOTPRE. The method resists internal and external attacks and ensures safe and efficient data transmission. In the data path selection stage, the ACO algorithm is used for network routing. The improvement of the pheromone concentration is proposed. In order to resist attacks from external attackers, proxy re-encryption is extended to WSN in the data encryption stage. The threshold secret sharing algorithm is introduced to generate a set of re-encryption key fragments composed of random numbers at the source node. We confirm the performance of our model via simulation studies.