Security Challenges and Efficient Security Solutions for Ad-Hoc Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks sense the information, process them locally and communicate it to the outside world via satellite or Internet. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) use tiny, inexpensive sensor nodes with several distinguishing characteristics: they have very low processing power and radio ranges, permit very low energy consumption and perform limited and specific monitoring and sensing functions. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are widely used for applications such as environment monitoring, habitat monitoring, forest fire control, border surveillance and health monitoring due to their capability of establishing communications among peer nodes in a self-organizing and adapting manner, without any infrastructure. Sensor networks use radio frequencies as a communication medium, which is vulnerable of all active and passive attacks from adversaries. The sensor net-work must be protected to avoid attacks from external parties. This protection is provided by the security primitives. This paper mainly concerns with problems associated in developing security protocols for wireless sensor networks, their requirements, and different types of attacks on sensor networks. This paper describes secure solutions for collecting and processing data in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Adequate security capabilities for medium and large scale WSNs are a hard but necessary goal to achieve to prepare these networks for the market. The paper also includes security and reliability challenges and also security solution for WSNs.