Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Evolutionary Intelligence https://doi.org/10.1007/s12065-020-00478-6 SPECIAL ISSUE A node to node security for sensor nodes implanted in cross cover multi‑layer architecture using Mc‑Nie algorithm Kumar Babu Batta 1  · Venkateswara Rao Gurrala 1  · Vishnu Srinivasa Murthy Yarlagadda 2 Received: 21 April 2020 / Revised: 27 July 2020 / Accepted: 22 August 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract Security, and lifetime enhancement are the two key factors in the feld of wireless sensor networks. Since the sensor nodes are placed in critical regions and are irreplaceable, it is essential to improve their lifetime through avoiding the energy con- sumption unnecessarily. Moreover, it is found that the sensor nodes are easily vulnerable due to their random placement. We propose a cross covered multi-layer architecture with an efcient Mc-Nie security algorithm. Moreover, the details of various attacks are also given in this paper. It is found that the proposed approach is performing well when compared to the recent state-of-the-art approaches. We have considered various parameters such as energy consumption, detecting the attacks, attack detection percentage, packet loss, and packet overhead in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. The improvement in energy consumption rate is around 81% when compared to the non-cross covered architecture. Keywords Cross covered multi-layer architecture · Cross-layered architecture · Energy consumption in WSN · Mc-Nie cryptosystem · Multi-layer architecture · Network lifetime · Sensor nodes · Wireless sensor networks 1 Introduction Nowadays, the advancements in technologies such as wire- less communication systems, and microelectronic mechani- cal systems (MEMS) have propagated the importance of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). There is considerable growth in wireless communication and microelectronic mechanical systems (MEMS), which leads to the expan- sion of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) [2]. A single WSN can be defned as a collection of nodes where each node can sense the surroundings data, which can be further used to control the environment or situation. The data will be continuously sensed to control the surroundings avoid- ing a huge loss. The number of nodes placed to control the surroundings is generally having characteristics like low power, low capacity, low cost, and also their transmis- sion speed is also less. The placement of such nodes will be done in critical regions. Humans are unable to travel to such places in order to collect the data [8, 18]. Hence, all the nodes are embedded with a network module to transfer the information. The basic architecture of WSN is shown in Fig. 1, which clearly gives information about how the sensor nodes get decentralized and distributed. Moreover, all the nodes are placed in an ad-hoc manner. The basic wireless sensor network (WSN) should satisfy certain criteria. Of which, the most important ones include less power consumption, less in cost, should manage rigid environments, and capable of handling high temperatures or cold regions. As they have diversifed and useful applica- tions, especially for military and common people, they have been highly considered for utilization. Their importance led to huge research in various aspects and limitations of WSNs in the past two decades. The sensor networks have been used in various aspects such as disaster management, human health analysis, estimating human behavior, assess- ing the quality of water, etc [6, 64]. The basic motivation is to design WSN protocols in such a way that they consume less energy, and each node should sustain in the network for a longer time [7]. The information * Vishnu Srinivasa Murthy Yarlagadda vishnu.murthy@vit.ac.in Kumar Babu Batta kbatta@gitam.edu Venkateswara Rao Gurrala vgurrala@gitam.edu 1 Department of CSE, GITAM, Visakhapatnam 530 045, India 2 School of Computer Science and Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Vellore 632 014, India