Defense mechanism against selective forwarding attack in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Recent advances in electronics and wireless communication technologies have enabled the development of large-scale wireless sensor networks that consist of many low-power, low-cost, and small-size sensor nodes. Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is emerging as a prevailing technology due to its wide range of applications in military and civilian domains. These networks are easily prone to security attacks, since once deployed these networks are unattended and unprotected. Some of the inherent features like limited battery and low memory make sensor networks incompatible with conventional security solutions, which need complex computations and high memory. Selective forwarding attack is one of the harmful attacks against sensor networks and can affect the whole sensor network communication. In such an attack compromised nodes drop packets selectively, which may deteriorate the network efficiency. In this paper multipath routing scheme is used as defense mechanism against selective forwarding attack. When a node detects packet drop during the routing, it will resend the packet through alternate route. Due to the resending mechanism reliability of the routing scheme is improved.