Secure and energy efficient routing protocol is fairly an open research despite a plethora of routing protocols has been proposed in the literature. However, most routing protocols specifically designed for resource constrained wireless devices, if not all, follow from the same perspective and almost have reached the maximum improvements. This chapter describes the design of cross-layer secure multi-hop zone routing protocol (MZRP) and a hybrid energy-efficient medium access control (MAC) featuring the benefits from both carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) and time-division multiple access (TDMA). MZRP employs the intelligent artificial neural network (ANN) self-organizing map (SOM) algorithm, which is performed at the coordinator or the base station (BS) to divide the area into multi-level zones. Then cluster heads (CHs) are chosen using k-medoids in each zone. The performance of MZRP is better in terms of energy efficiency compared to dual-hop and HT2HL as it extends the network lifetime using hybrid MAC and the security algorithm employed has less message update.
Part of the book: Recent Trends in Communication Networks