# A Lightweight Secure and Energy-Efficient Fog-Based Routing Protocol for Constraint Sensors Network
###### Abstract  
The Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has seen rapid growth in the development of real-time applications due to its ease of management and cost-effective attributes. However, the balance between optimization of network lifetime and load distribution between sensor nodes is a critical matter for the development of energy-efficient routing solutions. Recently, many solutions have been proposed for constraint-based networks using the cloud paradigm. However, they achieve network scalability with the additional cost of routing overheads and network latency. Moreover, the sensors' data is transmitted towards application users over the uncertain medium, which leads to compromised data security and its integrity. Therefore, this work proposes a light-weight secure and energy-efficient fog-based routing (SEFR) protocol to minimize data latency and increase energy management. It exploits the Quality of Service (QoS) factors and facilitates time-sensitive applications with network edges. Moreover, the proposed protocol protects real-time data based on two levels of cryptographic security primitives. In the first level, a lightweight data confidentiality scheme is proposed between the cluster heads and fog nodes, and in the second level, a high-performance asymmetric encryption scheme is proposed among fog and cloud layers. The analysis of simulation-based experiments has proven the significant outcomes of the proposed protocol compared to existing solutions in terms of routing, security, and network management. energy efficiency; information security; Internet of Things; cryptanalysis; lightweight routing; wireless sensor networks +
Footnote †: journal: _Energies_  
0000-0001-999-4000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-00000-00000-0000-00000-00000-00000-00000-00000-000  
computing has been adopted by many solutions for data management in terms of storage, processing, and scalability. It offers the on-demand availability of various resources for storage, computing power in a shared manner. Such cloud-based facilities significantly decrease the additional overheads on sensor nodes and improve the satisfactory level of application users [13; 14; 15]. However, the cloud-based infrastructure lacks mobility and data latency for its end users. Due to high network latency between application users and cloud servers, the problem of data loss ratio has also arisen. To overcome the issues of the cloud paradigm, the Commercial & Industrial Security Corporation (Cisco) network system introduced the concept of fog computing, which is an architecture and uses various edge devices to perform an extensive amount of processing and transmission in the distributed system [16]. It works like a fog layer between the network infrastructure and cloud paradigm, and decreases the shortcoming of bandwidth utilization, network delay, and network traffic. However, the sensors' data is transmitted over the wireless network and is subject to potential threats. Therefore, network security, authentication, and integrity are major security concerns for a constraints-oriented sensors network. The main aim of this paper is to present a lightweight secure and energy-efficient fog-based routing protocol for constraints sensors network to increase the network lifetime with an optimal routing scheme. Moreover, the sensors' data is also protected from unauthorized and malicious bodies and prevents the probabilities of compromised privacy, authenticity, and integrity in multi-levels. The key factors of the proposed work are as follows. 1. It uses the dynamic distance threshold to decreases the transmission cost with a longer network lifetime. Also, it reduces the overheads on the frequent exchange of local information among sensor nodes and leads to minimizes excessive energy consumption. 2. Data routing between cluster heads to fog layer and from fog layer to cloud servers is achieved by considering the QoS parameters.