An Energy Conserving Reversible and Irreversible Digital Watermarking Hybrid Scheme for Cluster-based Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are composed of a large number of sensor nodes that are scattered within a monitoring region and in which one or more sinks are responsible for the sensed data collecting. The sensor nodes are equipped with limited battery energy and are generally deployed in unattended environments such as in forests, on volcanoes, etc., to regularly report sensed data to the sink via wireless communication. Therefore, they cannot be recharged when a node depletes its battery energy. To design energy-conserving methods to prolong the network lifetime has become an important issue for WSNs. Nowadays the privacy and accuracy of data transmission are taken seriously; thus this paper aims at designing a data authentication mechanism integrated with an energy conserving routing scheme for WSNs to protect the integrity of receiving sensed data while at the same time conserving the battery energy of the sensor nodes. An energy-conserving reversible and irreversible digital watermarking hybrid scheme is proposed to balance the energy consumption and the robustness of the security.