Despite several years of intense research, the security and cryptography in wireless sensor networks still have a number of ongoing problems. This paper describes how identification (ID)-based node authentication can be used to solve the key agreement problem in a three-layer interaction. The scheme uses a novel security mechanism that considers the characteristics, architecture, and vulnerability of the sensors, and provides an ID-based node authentication that does not require expensive certificates. The scheme describes the routing process using a simple ID suitable for low power and ID exposure, and proposes an ID-based node authentication. This method achieves low-cost communications with an efficient protocol. Results from this study demonstrates that it improves routing performance under different node densities, and reduces the computational cost of key encryption and decryption.