Defending Against Denial of Sleep Attack in Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

A wireless sensor network is a wireless network organized with a large number of sensor nodes with specialized sensors that can monitor various physical attributes such as temperature, pressure, vibration, and sound. Sensor nodes are powered up with batteries. Due to unattended nature of the deployment, the sensor nodes’ batteries cannot be recharged. In such conditions, the nodes must optimally consume power. Various protocols are designed to reduce the energy consumption of sensor nodes by keeping the antenna in sleep mode 90% of time, so that power is saved. MAC protocols are designed to adaptively vary the sleep time based on the communication need. But attackers use their knowledge of their underlying MAC protocol, to reduce the sleep time for the node, so that the lifetime of a node reduces. This problem is popularly known as Denial of sleep attack. In this paper, we propose an effective solution }to defend against such attacks in  a sensor network. Our proposed solution introduces communication overhead only when the attack is suspected and also the defending mechanism is triggered only in the area of attack. Also the analysis shows that our solution is very strong against SYNC replay attack and jamming attacks.