Study

Wireless sensor networks are successfully used in the conditions of war as well as natural calamities like earthquake, flood, volcanoes etc. Rapid technological advances in the area of micro electro-mechanical systems have spurred the development of small inexpensive sensors capable of intelligent sensing. A significant amount of research has been done in the area of connecting large numbers of these sensors to create robust and scalable Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Proposed applications for WSNs include habitat monitoring, battlefield surveillance, and security systems. WSNs aim to be energy efficient, self-organizing, scalable, and robust. Relatively little work has been done on security issues related to sensor networks. The resource scarcity, ad-hoc deployment, and immense scale of WSNs make secure communication a particularly challenging problem. The primary consideration for sensor networks is energy efficiency, security schemes must balance their security features against the communication and computational overhead required to implement them. This paper will describe the fundamental challenges in the emergent field of sensor network security and the initial approaches to solving them