Designing lightweight secure and energy-efficient wireless acoustic sensor networks for optimized data transmission and processing

The deployment of effective data transmission with minimal resources, minimum architecture, low power consumption, and improved security makes this proposed lightweight wireless acoustic sensor network (WASNs) an appealing solution. This paper addresses the challenges of secure and energy-efficient audio broadcasting in WASNs. To transfer the entire gathered signal from source to recipient, a common setup for this application would be to send it over multi-hop communication to a distant server. On the other hand, persistent data streaming may induce an abrupt reduction in sensor energy, which may shorten the network lifetime and raise concerns about the application’s feasibility. This suggested method is supplemented during the design phase with several methods or processes for reducing the overhead of architectural design, specifically regarding network resource consumption and development effort. This method aims to reduce the amount of energy used by the acoustic origin sensor and free up network bandwidth by carrying less unnecessary data. The proposed method guarantees secure transfer through an enhanced Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). The method introduces a session key mechanism and a chaos-based private key generation approach to enhance resilience against cryptographic attacks. A novel feature extraction strategy utilizing a variety of extraction characteristics and classifications is suggested in this study. Based on experimental results, the suggested method saves 74.35% of energy and obtains 89% of feature extraction accuracy when compared to streaming the complete acoustic data to a distant server. The proposed method achieves superior security against known attacks while reducing computational overhead by over 97%.