Enhancing reliability and security in wireless sensor networks using direct sequence spread spectrum

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are increasingly being used in vital environmental tracking, healthcare, and industrial automation, with reliability and security being key concerns. However, the liability to interference, multipath fading, and malicious attacks associated with WSNs is very high due to their limited power, as well as their open medium. This paper investigates the usage of direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) to improve the security and reliability of the physical layer in WSNs. DSSS makes it more challenging for narrowband interference to occur, minimizes the bit error rate (BER), and mitigates the effects of eavesdropping. A MATLAB-based simulation model is derived to assess the associated performance of DSSS- constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs) under the additive white gaussian noise (AWGN) and interference conditions. The results indicate an enormous gain over signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the throughput and the packet delivery ratio (PDR) as against conventional non-spread spectrum transmission. The results show that the usage of DSSS in WSN is most robust and confidential especially for secure and reliable applications in the internet of things (IoT) environments.