Abstract
In wireless sensor networks (WSN), data packets being sent over wireless environments could get corrupted or compromised due to channel noises or malicious attacks. Using traditional full encryption to secure the transmitted data is costly and even not practical for WSN due to the inherent resource-constrained nature of sensor nodes. Selective encryption (SE) that encrypts part of the data can greatly reduce the computational overhead for huge volumes of data in low-power networks. Encrypted data is more sensitive to transmission errors; therefore, additional error correction capability is required to efficiently recover the lost/erroneous encrypted information. In this paper, we propose a new Selective Hybrid Cipher-based mechanism, which integrates AES-based SE and Forward Error Correction codes to achieve both secure and reliable data transmission in WSN. Performance of the proposed mechanism is evaluated using simulations, and is compared with that of the traditional SE-based and full encryption-based mechanisms.