In wireless sensor networks, nodes are mostly deployed in unsupervised areas and are vulnerable to a variety of attacks. Therefore, data security is a vital aspect to be considered. However, due to the limited computation capability and memory of sensor nodes, it is difficult to perform the complex encryption algorithm, as well as the key distribution and management algorithm. Toward this end, a low-complexity algorithm for security in wireless sensor networks is of significant importance. In this article, a weakly secure network coding based multipath routing scheme is proposed, which can guarantee the data confidentiality in transmission probabilistically, and can improve the energy efficiency in the meantime. Then the simulations of the probability of transmission being secure are performed. The results show that with the increase of the number of hops k, the probability of transmission being secure suffers from a rapid decrease. On the contrary, with the increase of multicast capacity h it undergoes a slight growth. Therefore, the weak security can be achieved with probability approaching 1 by limiting the number of hops and increasing the multicast capacity. Meanwhile, the simulations of energy consumption are performed and the comparison between the energy consumption of the scheme in this article and the multipath routing scheme without network coding is conducted. The results show that by employing network coding, the scheme in this article can improve the energy efficiency, and the more packets transmitted, the more energy consumption can be reduced.
Keywords: energy efficiency; multipath routing; probability of transmission being secure; weakly secure network coding.