Abstract
Being often deployed in remote or hostile environments, wireless sensor networks are vulnerable to various types of security attacks. A possible solution to reduce the security risks is to use directional antennas instead of omnidirectional ones or in conjunction with them. Due to their increased complexity, higher costs and larger sizes, directional antennas are not traditionally used in wireless sensor networks, but recent technology trends may support this method. This paper surveys existing state of the art approaches in the field, offering a broad perspective of the future use of directional antennas in mitigating security risks, together with new challenges and open research issues.
Highlights
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have emerged as a key technology for a broad spectrum of applications, ranging from weather forecasting [1] or complex industrial plant monitoring [2] to military surveillance [3]. These types of cyber-physical systems are prone to various malicious attacks which theoretically originate from three different causes: (i) the limited power, communication and computational resources of the nodes; (ii) the unattended and hostile environments where they are often deployed; and (iii) the open nature of the wireless transmission medium
The use of directional antennas for equipping WSN nodes arises from the need to optimize energy consumption, to raise the quality of transmissions or to decrease the number of hops due to longer transmission ranges
Directional antennas can be seen as a valuable resource for reducing the security risks that inherently affect WSNs’ operation
Summary
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have emerged as a key technology for a broad spectrum of applications, ranging from weather forecasting [1] or complex industrial plant monitoring [2] to military surveillance [3]. Directional antennas can mitigate the malicious attack risks in WSNs in two ways: (a) directly, by being immune to attacks launched from outside their narrow radiation region; or (b) indirectly based on node position verification—here a node equipped with directional antenna, using the received signal’s direction of arrival to compute the position of a sender node (in conjunction with other trusted nodes or beacons), can identify malicious nodes by checking their position against a trusted list By using these two lines of defense against hostile attacks, the nodes equipped with directional antennas may identify, mitigate or even eliminate security risks when speaking about eavesdropping, jamming, wormhole attacks or Sybil attacks. From this perspective, this paper aims to survey the current state of the art in the field and to identify the major research challenges and perspectives.
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