A Survey on Wireless Sensor Network Security

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest in the research community due their wide range of applications. Due to distributed nature of these networks and their deployment in remote areas, these networks are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their proper functioning. This problem is more critical if the network is deployed for some mission-critical applications such as in a tactical battlefield. Random failure of nodes is also very likely in real-life deployment scenarios. Due to resource constraints in the sensor nodes, traditional security mechanisms with large overhead of computation and communication are infeasible in WSNs. Security in sensor networks is, therefore, a particularly challenging task. This paper discusses the current state of the art in security mechanisms for WSNs. Various types of attacks are discussed and their countermeasures presented. A brief discussion on the future direction of research in WSN security is also included.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 2 table

Adaptive Hierarchical Data Aggregation using Compressive Sensing (A-HDACS) for Non-smooth Data Field

Compressive Sensing (CS) has been applied successfully in a wide variety of applications in recent years, including photography, shortwave infrared cameras, optical system research, facial recognition, MRI, etc. In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), significant research work has been pursued to investigate the use of CS to reduce the amount of data communicated, particularly in data aggregation applications and thereby improving energy efficiency. However, most of the previous work in WSN has used CS under the assumption that data field is smooth with negligible white Gaussian noise. In these schemes signal sparsity is estimated globally based on the entire data field, which is then used to determine the CS parameters. In more realistic scenarios, where data field may have regional fluctuations or it is piecewise smooth, existing CS based data aggregation schemes yield poor compression efficiency. In order to take full advantage of CS in WSNs, we propose an Adaptive Hierarchical Data Aggregation using Compressive Sensing (A-HDACS) scheme. The proposed schemes dynamically chooses sparsity values based on signal variations in local regions. We prove that A-HDACS enables more sensor nodes to employ CS compared to the schemes that do not adapt to the changing field. The simulation results also demonstrate the improvement in energy efficiency as well as accurate signal recovery

Fundamentals of Large Sensor Networks: Connectivity, Capacity, Clocks and Computation

Sensor networks potentially feature large numbers of nodes that can sense their environment over time, communicate with each other over a wireless network, and process information. They differ from data networks in that the network as a whole may be designed for a specific application. We study the theoretical foundations of such large scale sensor networks, addressing four fundamental issues- connectivity, capacity, clocks and function computation. To begin with, a sensor network must be connected so that information can indeed be exchanged between nodes. The connectivity graph of an ad-hoc network is modeled as a random graph and the critical range for asymptotic connectivity is determined, as well as the critical number of neighbors that a node needs to connect to. Next, given connectivity, we address the issue of how much data can be transported over the sensor network. We present fundamental bounds on capacity under several models, as well as architectural implications for how wireless communication should be organized. Temporal information is important both for the applications of sensor networks as well as their operation.We present fundamental bounds on the synchronizability of clocks in networks, and also present and analyze algorithms for clock synchronization. Finally we turn to the issue of gathering relevant information, that sensor networks are designed to do. One needs to study optimal strategies for in-network aggregation of data, in order to reliably compute a composite function of sensor measurements, as well as the complexity of doing so. We address the issue of how such computation can be performed efficiently in a sensor network and the algorithms for doing so, for some classes of functions.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, Submitted to the Proceedings of the IEE