Abstract: In this study, we proposed a mutual authentication protocol between sensor nodes and gateway nodes. In our scheme, we adopted multiple security techniques against different security threats, such as time stamps against replay attacks, the ZUC encryption algorithm against data eaves dropping and unauthorized falsification. To verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our scheme, we implemented a telosb-based wireless sensor test bed, in which all sensor nodes were equipped with our security scheme to facilitate mutual authentications between each other. The experiment results reveal that, our proposal can not only resist the common attacks, such as the impersonation attack, replay attack and DoS attacks, but show a sound network performance.