International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) Volume 119 – No.17, June 2015 34 Review on the Research Evolution on Secure Routing in Wireless Sensor Network Nasreen Fathima Assistant Professor, Department of CSE, ATME College of Engineering, Mysore, India ABSTRACT Security in routing mechanisms of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has become a key aspect of the current research fields where various security issues due to vulnerable attacks in WSN drag the attention of many researchers. This study is intended to investigate some of the existing secure routing techniques for WSN and emphasizes on the existing efficient secure routing techniques. Inferrencing has been done to evaluate the performance efficiency, limitations and the advantages of the different types of existing secure routing techniques. This paper focuses on the state-of-art study of the existing surveys and presents technologies which are emphasized on designing robustness and computationally efficient techniques for secure routing in WSN. This paper also discusses some of the most important and significant findings as well as a brief illustration of research gap for various robust and computational efficient secure routing techniques in the area of WSN, in addition the description of a set of gaps and recommendations will be helpful for future direction of research. Keywords Robustness and Computational efficiency, Wireless Sensor Network, Secure Routing Techniques 1. INTRODUCTION A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a collection of geographically distributed nodes, where nodes are small size battery driven devices deployed over hostile areas. The sensor nodes are connected with each other in Ad-hoc manner, the devices have capability of running various applications and communicating with other nodes within the network and each node transmits its sensing information to a Sink node which collects all the data as a whole from various other nodes after that the total collected measured aggregated data then reach the various applications through a gateway. The sensor nodes can participate in transmitting data to the other nodes within its predefined range [1]. As the wireless sensor network infrastructure is infrastructureless thus some unique topologies of the network enables dynamic adjustment of the individual nodes in a hostile area. WSN is considered as a most prominent and efficient networking technology as so many nodes have CPU power and radio transceiver capacity and can be deployed over a sensing area where most of the conventional networks with fixed infrastructure are insufficient to perform a particular task. As the power source of each node has some limited capacity so the efficient and the throughput of the network is also limited. Various external factors such as weather conditions can affect the performance of the wireless sensor network. Wireless sensor network is already in use of environmental monitoring, habitat monitoring, and defense etc. All the communication within the sensor nodes takes place using the standard routing protocols. Majority of the routing principle in WSN is done either using single-hop or using multi-hop technique. For reference, Fig. 1 shows the classification of existing routing protocols that are also found frequently adopted in research work. Data centric 1. Flooding & Gossiping 2. SPIN 3. Directed Diffusion 4. Energy-Aware Routing 5. Rumor Routing 6. Gradient-based Routing 7. CADR 8. ACQUIRE Hierarchical 1. LEACH 2. PEGASIS 3. TEEN 4. APTEEN Location 1. MECN 2. SMECN 3. GEAR Routing Protocols in WSN Figure 1 Taxonomy of Routing Protocols in WSN Some of the unique charecteristics of the routing in WSN are i) complications of undertaking routing principle in static and dynamic scenarios, ii) excess consumption of the energy while performing routing, iii) higher degree of vulnerability of various attack scenarios in the existing routing. However, the prime targets of design and development of routing protocols are to mitigate the energy depletion issues. The phenomenon of routing is strongly associated with the security systems of the wireless sensor network. As WSN basically comprises of small sensor nodes with limited memory and computational capabilities, hence, it is quite difficult to incorporate complex security or cryptographic based algorithm within the sensor nodes. Even if such work towards including security algorithm is done within the sensor node, it will surely bring forth the tradeoff between the security standards as well as networking (communication) performance of the WSN system. Therefore, it is highly essential to formulate the security solution considering the routing protocols in WSN. Interestingly, if any algorithm is designed newly, its efficiency is tested using time and space complexity. But, surprisingly, if a security protocol is designed for securing the communication system in WSN, time and space complexity is not enough for performing the effective analysis of the WSN system. It is highly essential that Quality- of-Service (QoS) parameters be considered to testify the effectiveness of the security algorithm with respect to the