Surveillance Wireless Sensor Networks (SWSNs) are the result of abundant data gathering requirements occurring in Wireless Sensor Networks, specifically for surveillance reasons. Most SWSNs operate by sensing the environment and transmitting the acquired data to a sink in order to utilize it for decision making processes such as object detection, classification, localization, or event detection. In this respect, secure routing of acquired data is crucial since a decision making process is performed according to the received data. Although there are various other attack types targeting different layers of the protocol stack, in this study we primarily focus on routing attacks occurring in the network layer, highlight possible defense mechanisms with respect to each attack type, and present impacts of routing attacks on SWSNs
