Enhancement of selecting the cluster head based on the voting mechanism and Elliptic Curve Cryptography for Wireless Sensor Networks (ECHVM)

Abstract

The Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), which are deployed in harsh environments, are extremely susceptible to localized battery exhaustion as well as intelligent inside routing threats, especially sinkhole and data falsification attacks. In this paper, we present ECHVM (Enhanced Cluster Head selection by Voting and an ECC-based Blockchain Mechanism), a novel, secure, and energy-efficient routing framework to achieve an optimal trade-off between network security and hardware resource efficiency. We present the ECHVM protocol that combines Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) with a lightweight, local distributed ledger to mitigate risks of centralized authority by transferring the verification of crucial network events from a single, highly vulnerable centralized alert sink node to a decentralized, voting-based consensus among neighboring nodes. In this study, a weighted voting algorithm based on node and distance proximity metrics is applied to cluster head selection, where a 51% neighbor consensus rule is leveraged to validate local ledger transactions against malicious acts. Moreover, a local energy density and topological communication geometry-oriented energy-efficient cluster head (CH) selection algorithm is crafted to ensure balanced CH distribution in the high-density areas of the network structure so as to avoid the premature energy hole problem. Using the standard first-order radio energy model, quantitative simulations performed in MATLAB show that ECHVM achieves a malicious node detection rate of 98.2% and extends the network lifetime by 30% compared to state-of-the-art protocols (e.g., ELSO and SEC-HDT) because of proactive topology defense and rapid node sleeping. The results of statistical validation using the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test confirm that both the reduction in energy consumption and network longevity offered by ECHVM are highly significant ( p  = 0.019), justifying ECHVM as a mathematically sound, permanent, scalable security framework suitable for resource-constrained, dense Internet of Things (IoT) and smart sensing applications for next-generation communication systems.