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

A label based routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

One of the challenging issues in wireless sensor networks is to acquire, process, and transmit information using the least amount of battery power; In response to this problem, a novel routing scheme for wireless sensor networks, called Information Dissemination via Label Forwarding (IDLF) , is presented. IDLF consists of three information exchanging stages. In the first stage, a label is disseminated by a source. After a sink receives the label, it replies a request to the source. By exchanging a label and request, a data path between a source and sink is formed. Finally, an actual data is transmitted through the data path. Transmitting labels and requests, instead of actual data, reduces the redundant transmissions of data packets, and thus achieves energy savings; In addition to IDLF, four energy management schemes---directional forwarding, minimum transmission around the sink, battery threshold value, and differential coding---are proposed. We compare IDLF with flooding and another wireless routing protocol named SPIN. The simulation results show that the IDLF together with four energy management schemes can save a significant amount of energy compared to the other two routings