Wireless Sensors Networks are integrating human daily life at a fast rate. Applications cover a wide range of fields, including home security, agriculture, climate change, fire prevention, and so on and so forth. If WSN were initially flat networks, hierarchical, or cluster-based networks have been introduced in order to achieve a better performance in terms of energy efficiency, topology management, delay minimization, load balancing, routing techniques, etc. As cluster-based algorithms proved to be efficient in terms of energy balancing, security has been of less importance in the field. Data shared by nodes in a WSN can be very sensitive depending on the field of application. Therefore, it is important to ensure security at various levels of WSN. This paper proposes a formal modeling of the energy consumed to secure communications in a cluster-based WSN in general. The concept is implemented using the Proof of Authentication (POAh) paradigm of blockchain and applied to a Multi-hop Clustering Algorithm based on spectral classification. The studied metrics are residual energy in the network, the number of alive nodes, first and last dead node.
Keywords: clustering; cryptography; energy; security; wireless sensors network.