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

Recent advances in industrial wireless sensor networks towards efficient management in IoT

With the accelerated development of Internet-of- Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSN) are gaining importance in the continued advancement of information and communication technologies, and have been connected and integrated with Internet in vast industrial applications. However, given the fact that most wireless sensor devices are resource constrained and operate on batteries, the communication overhead and power consumption are therefore important issues for wireless sensor networks design. In order to efficiently manage these wireless sensor devices in a unified manner, the industrial authorities should be able to provide a network infrastructure supporting various WSN applications and services that facilitate the management of sensor-equipped real-world entities. This paper presents an overview of industrial ecosystem, technical architecture, industrial device management standards and our latest research activity in developing a WSN management system. The key approach to enable efficient and reliable management of WSN within such an infrastructure is a cross layer design of lightweight and cloud-based RESTful web service

A bounded heuristic for collection-based routing in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are used to monitor and control physical phenomena and to provide interaction between clients and the physical environment. Clients have been typically users or user applications, but next generation wireless sensor networks will also work in machine-to-machine scenarios where some nodes can be interested in some other nodes' data. These scenarios may run the risk of becoming overloaded with messaging, a pernicious fact in particular for constrained networks where both bandwidth and power supply are limited. Resource collections can be used in wireless sensor networks to improve bandwidth usage and to reduce energy consumption, reducing the overall number of notification packets and wrapping overhead, required for the delivery of sensor data. This article proposes a heuristic algorithm for the planning of both routing and collections, in wireless sensor networks. Results show that collections are always worthwhile, and that the heuristic is able to find feasible and cost effective solutions, approaching its lower bound.FCT from Portugal within the CEOT research center [UID/MULTI/00631/2013

An Outline of Security in Wireless Sensor Networks: Threats, Countermeasures and Implementations

With the expansion of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the need for securing the data flow through these networks is increasing. These sensor networks allow for easy-to-apply and flexible installations which have enabled them to be used for numerous applications. Due to these properties, they face distinct information security threats. Security of the data flowing through across networks provides the researchers with an interesting and intriguing potential for research. Design of these networks to ensure the protection of data faces the constraints of limited power and processing resources. We provide the basics of wireless sensor network security to help the researchers and engineers in better understanding of this applications field. In this chapter, we will provide the basics of information security with special emphasis on WSNs. The chapter will also give an overview of the information security requirements in these networks. Threats to the security of data in WSNs and some of their counter measures are also presented

KALwEN+: Practical Key Management Schemes for Gossip-Based Wireless Medical Sensor Networks

The constrained resources of sensors restrict the design of a key management scheme for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this work, we first formalize the security model of ALwEN, which is a gossip-based wireless medical sensor network (WMSN) for ambient assisted living. Our security model considers the node capture, the gossip-based network and the revocation problems, which should be valuable for ALwEN-like applications. Based on Shamir's secret sharing technique, we then propose two key management schemes for ALwEN, namely the KALwEN+ schemes, which are proven with the security properties defined in the security model. The KALwEN+ schemes not only fit ALwEN, but also can be tailored to other scalable wireless sensor networks based on gossiping

An Online Outlier Detection Technique for Wireless Sensor Networks using Unsupervised Quarter-Sphere Support Vector Machine

The main challenge faced by outlier detection techniques designed for wireless sensor networks is achieving high detection rate and low false alarm rate while maintaining the resource consumption in the network to a minimum. In this paper, we propose an online outlier detection technique with low computational complexity and memory usage based on an unsupervised centered quarter-sphere support vector machine for real-time environmental monitoring applications of wireless sensor networks. The proposed approach is completely local and thus saves communication overhead and scales well with increase of nodes deployed. We take advantage of spatial correlations that exist in sensor data of adjacent nodes to reduce the false alarm rate in real-time. Experiments with both synthetic and real data collected from the Intel Berkeley Research Laboratory show that our technique achieves better mining performance in terms of parameter selection using different kernel functions compared to an earlier offline outlier detection technique designed for wireless sensor networks