Sensor networks can be used in many sorts of environments. The increase of pollution and carbon footprint are nowadays an important environmental problem. The use of sensors and sensor networks can help to make an early detection in order to mitigate their effect over the medium. The deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) requires high-energy efficiency and secures mechanisms to ensure the data veracity. Moreover, when WSNs are deployed in harsh environments, it is very difficult to recharge or replace the sensor's batteries. For this reason, the increase of network lifetime is highly desired. WSNs also work in unattended environments, which is vulnerable to different sort of attacks. Therefore, both energy efficiency and security must be considered in the development of routing protocols for WSNs. In this paper, we present a novel Secure and Low-energy Zone-based Routing Protocol (SeLeZoR) where the nodes of the WSN are split into zones and each zone is separated into clusters. Each cluster is controlled by a cluster head. Firstly, the information is securely sent to the zone-head using a secret key; then, the zone-head sends the data to the base station using the secure and energy efficient mechanism. This paper demonstrates that SeLeZoR achieves better energy efficiency and security levels than existing routing protocols for WSNs.
2869CHs, the size of the cluster, and the workload balance among clusters are also important to determine the energy consumption of the entire network.Finally, it is important to apply some mechanisms to improve the network performance and the security issues. This is the case of cooperative decision algorithms 11, where the nodes use the network information and the information provided by the user to take intelligent decisions. These techniques are applied in several fields, like environmental monitoring 12.This paper presents a new zone-based wireless sensor network routing protocol for pollution monitoring called Secure and Low-energy Zone-based Routing Protocol (SeLeZor). This protocol also implements several improvements to enhance the issue of energy consumption and data vulnerability. SeLeZor divides the network area into zones, and each zone is divided in clusters. Hence, the data are exchanged between intra-zone communication and inter-zone communication by using a secure and powerful key at each level in order to identify the malicious data while maintaining the network performance.The rest of this paper is organized as follows. The related work is presented in Section 2. Section 3 shows the proposed network model. The details of SeLeZoR are presented in Section 4. Section 5 provides the performance results. Finally, Section 6 concludes the paper.