Selective forwarding detection (SFD) in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Security is the critical subject in wireless sensor networks. Therefore, WSNs are susceptible to several types of security attacks. One reason to attack sensor networks is the limited capacity of sensor nodes. The security attacks could affect the most significant applications in WSNs area such as military surveillance, traffic monitor, and healthcare. Thus, there are different types of detection approaches against security attacks on the network layer in WSNs. Also, there are severe constraints on sensor nodes like reliability, energy efficiency, and scalability, which affect the security in WSNs. Since the sensor nodes have limited capabilities for most of these constraints, a selective forwarding attack is difficult to detect in the networks. Malicious nodes in the selective forwarding attack, work as normal nodes. However, it attempts to find the sensitive messages and drop them before sending the packet to other nodes. In order to keep this type of attacks away from networks, we propose a multi layers approach (SFD) that preserves the safely of data transmission between sensor nodes while detecting the selective forwarding attack. Furthermore, the approach includes reliability, energy efficiency, and scalability.