Security in Wireless Sensor Networks: Issues and Challenges

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an emerging technology that shows great promise for various futuristic applications both for mass public and military. The sensing technology combined with processing power and wireless communication makes it lucrative for being exploited in abundance in future. The inclusion of wireless communication technology also incurs various types of security threats. The intent of this paper is to investigate the security related issues and challenges in wireless sensor networks. We identify the security threats, review proposed security mechanisms for wireless sensor networks. We also discuss the holistic view of security for ensuring layered and robust security in wireless sensor networks.Comment: 6 page

Performance and energy efficiency in wireless self-organized networks

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Distributed Cooperative Transmission with Unreliable and Untrustworthy Relay Channels

Cooperative transmission is an emerging wireless communication technique that improves wireless channel capacity through multiuser cooperation in the physical layer. It is expected to have a profound impact on network performance and design. However, cooperative transmission can be vulnerable to selfish behaviors and malicious attacks, especially in its current design. In this paper, we investigate two fundamental questions Does cooperative transmission provide new opportunities to malicious parties to undermine the network performance? Are there new ways to defend wireless networks through physical layer cooperation? Particularly, we study the security vulnerabilities of the traditional cooperative transmission schemes and show the performance degradation resulting from the misbehaviors of relay nodes. Then, we design a trust-assisted cooperative scheme that can detect attacks and has self-healing capability. The proposed scheme performs much better than the traditional schemes when there are malicious/selfish nodes or severe channel estimation errors. Finally, we investigate the advantage of cooperative transmission in terms of defending against jamming attacks. A reduction in link outage probability is achieved

A survey on wireless ad hoc networks

A wireless ad hoc network is a collection of wireless nodes that can dynamically self-organize into an arbitrary and temporary topology to form a network without necessarily using any pre-existing infrastructure. These characteristics make ad hoc networks well suited for military activities, emergency operations, and disaster recoveries. Nevertheless, as electronic devices are getting smaller, cheaper, and more powerful, the mobile market is rapidly growing and, as a consequence, the need of seamlessly internetworking people and devices becomes mandatory. New wireless technologies enable easy deployment of commercial applications for ad hoc networks. The design of an ad hoc network has to take into account several interesting and difficult problems due to noisy, limited-range, and insecure wireless transmissions added to mobility and energy constraints. This paper presents an overview of issues related to medium access control (MAC), routing, and transport in wireless ad hoc networks and techniques proposed to improve the performance of protocols. Research activities and problems requiring further work are also presented. Finally, the paper presents a project concerning an ad hoc network to easily deploy Internet services on low-income habitations fostering digital inclusion8th IFIP/IEEE International conference on Mobile and Wireless CommunicationRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Performance Evaluation of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks using simulation tools

Recent studies demonstrate that the routing protocol performances in vehicular networks can improve using dynamic information on the traffic conditions. WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks) and VANETs (Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks) are exactly related with this statement and represent the trend of wireless networks research program in the last years. In this context, a new type of network has been developed: in fact, HSVN (Hybrid Sensor and Vehicular Network) let WSNs and VANETs cooperate through dynamic information data exchanges with the aim to improve road safety, and especially to warn the driver and the co-pilot of any event occurred in the road ahead, such as traffic jam, accidents or bad weather. The results will be immediate: less accidents means more saved lives, less traffic means a pollution decrease, and from the technological point of view, this communication protocol will open the door to attractive services, such as downloading of multimedia services or internet browsing, that means easier, safer and more comfortable trips. It is out of doubt that speaking about cars and road technology developments, the market and the interests about this field increase exponentially. Recent projects such as CVIS [1] and COMeSafety [2], focused on improving the road driving, and are the concrete demonstration that this entire context can get soon very close to reality. Owing to their peculiar characteristics, VANETs require the definition of specific networking techniques, whose feasibility and performance are usually tested by means of simulation. Starting from this point, this project will present a HSVN platform, and will also introduce and evaluate a communication protocol between VANETs and WSNs using the NCTUns 6.0 [3] simulator. We will particularly analyze the performances of 2 types of Scenarios developed during our project. Both of them are in an urban context, but we will extract different useful results analyzing the packet losses, the throughput and the end-to-end packet delay

Mobile ad hoc networks for intelligent systems

Advances in wireless technology and portable computing along with demands for high user mobility have provided a major promotion toward the development of ad hoc networks. Mobile ad hoc networks feature dynamic topology, self-organization, limited bandwidth and battery power of a node. They do not rely on specialized routers for path discovery and traffic routing. Research on ad hoc networks has been extensively investigated in the past few years and related work has focused on many of the layers of the communications architecture. This research intends to investigate applications of MANET for intelligent systems, including intelligent transportation system (ITS), sensor network and mobile intelligent robot network, and propose some approaches to topology management, link layer multiple access and routing algorithms. Their performance is evaluated by theoretical analysis and off-the-shelf simulation tools. Most current research on ad hoc networks assumes the availability of IEEE 802.11. However, the RTS/CTS protocol of 802.11 still leads to packet collision which in turn decreases the network throughput and lifetime. For sensor networks, sensors are mostly battery operated. Hence, resolving packet collision may improve network lifetime by saving valuable power. Using space and network diversity combination, this work proposes a new packet separation approach to packet collision caused by masked nodes. Inter-vehicle communication is a key component of ITS and it is also called vehicular ad hoc network. VANET has many features different from regular MANETs in terms of mobility, network size and connectivity. Given rapid topology changes and network partitioning, this work studies how to organize the numerous vehicular nodes and establish message paths between any pair of vehicular nodes if they are not apart too far away. In urban areas, the inter-vehicle communication has different requirements and constraints than highway environments. The proposed position-based routing strategy for VANETs utilizes the traffic pattern in city environments. Packets are forwarded based on traffic lights timing sequence and the moving direction of relaying vehicles. A multicast protocol is also introduced to visualize the real time road traffic with customized scale. Only vehicles related to a source node\u27s planned trajectory will reply the query packet. The visualized real time traffic information therefore helps the driver make better decision in route planning when traffic congestion happens. Nowadays robots become more and more powerful and intelligent. They can take part in operations in a cooperative manner which makes distributed control necessary. Ad hoc robot communication network is still fresh field for researchers working on networking technology. This work investigates some key issues in robot ad hoc network and evaluate the challenges while establishing robot ad hoc networks

Secure Connectivity Through Key Predistribution Under Jamming Attacks In Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks

Wireless ad hoc and sensor networks have received attention from research communities over the last several years. The ability to operate without a fixed infrastructure is suitable for a wide range of applications which in many cases require protection from security attacks. One of the first steps to provide security is to distribute cryptographic keys among nodes for bootstrapping security. The unique characteristics of ad hoc networks create a challenge in distributing keys among limited resource devices. In this dissertation we study the impact on secure connectivity achieved through key pre-distribution, of jamming attacks which form one of the easiest but efficient means for disruption of network connectivity. In response to jamming, networks can undertake different coping strategies (e.g., using power adaptation, spatial retreats, and directional antennas). Such coping techniques have impact in terms of the changing the initial secure connectivity created by secure links through key predistribution. The objective is to explore how whether predistribution techniques are robust enough for ad hoc/sensor networks that employ various techniques to cope with jamming attacks by taking into account challenges that arise with key predistribution when strategies for coping with jamming attacks are employed. In the first part of this dissertation we propose a hybrid key predistribution scheme that supports ad hoc/sensor networks that use mobility to cope with jamming attacks. In the presence of jamming attacks, this hybrid scheme provides high key connectivity while reducing the number of isolated nodes (after coping with jamming using spatial retreats). The hybrid scheme is a combination of random key predistribution and deployment-based key predistribution schemes that have complementary useful features for secure connectivity. In the second part we study performance of these key predistribution schemes under other jamming coping techniques namely power adaptation and directional antennas. We show that the combination of the hybrid key predistribution and coping techniques can help networks in maintaining secure connectivity even under jamming attacks