Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest due to the range of applications they enable. Unfortunately, WSNs are exposed to numerous security threats that can adversely affect the success of important applications. Securing WSNs is challenging due to their unique nature as an application and a network, and due to their limited capabilities. In this paper, we argue that the WSN security research generally considers mechanisms that are modeled after and evaluated against abstract applications and WSN organizations. Instead, we propose that an effective solution for WSNs must be sensitive to the application and infrastructure. We propose an application-specific security context as the combination of a potential attacker's motivation and the WSN vulnerability. The vulnerability is a function of factors such as the sensor field, the WSN infrastructure, the application, protocols and system software, as well the accessibility and the observability of the WSN. To reduce the vulnerability, we argue that WSN design must balance traditional objectives such as energy efficiency, cost, and application level performance with security to a degree proportional to the attacker's motivation. We illustrate this argument via two example applications.
Abstract-In CSMA networks, there is a significant overhead associated with each packet including header overhead and contention overhead. The high overhead problem is exacerbated because some of these overheads are required to be at the lowest data rate to ensure that all contending nodes can compete fairly. For applications where packets are small, such as Voice over IP (VOIP), this means that a majority of the available transmission time is wasted on overhead. Packet aggregation is one of the techniques that has been proposed to amortize the per-transmission overhead over multiple aggregated packets. However, existing heuristics are limited, often not considering multi-rate wireless MAC, or operation in a WLAN environment. In this paper, we first formulate the problem of optimal aggregation for a multi-rate CSMA MAC protocol and show that it is NP-Hard. We then propose two heuristics that solve the aggregation problem for multi-rate WLANs. The first, which we call Data Rate based Aggregation protocol (DRA), divides packets in the MAC queue into groups based on the data rate they are to be transmitted at. The algorithm aggregates packets in the same group and broadcasts the aggregated frame at the data rate of that group. Empirically, DRA achieves several fold increase in throughput compared to basic aggregation. DRA also achieves up to a 200% increase in the number of VoIP calls supported by a single 802.11g AP compared to using state of the art aggregation protocols. The second heuristic, which we call Data Rate based Aggregation with Selective Demotion (DRA-SD), enables cross data rate aggregation. Through preliminary evaluation, we show that selectively demoting packets can further improve performance.
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest due to the wide range of applications they enable. Unfortunately, WSNs are exposed to numerous security threats that can adversely affect the success of important applications. Securing WSNs is challenging due to their limited capabilities and the unique nature of the network and applications. In this paper, we argue that the WSN security research generally considers mechanisms that are modeled after and evaluated against abstract applications and WSN organizations. Instead, we propose that the solution for WSN security must be sensitive to the application and infrastructure. Specifically, we formulate a new notion of an application-specific security context as the combination of a potential attacker's motivation and the WSN vulnerability. The vulnerability is a function of factors such as the sensor field, WSN infrastructure, application, protocols, system software, accessibility, and the observability of the WSN. To reduce the vulnerability, we argue that WSN design must balance security with traditional objectives such as the cost, energy efficiency, and application level performance to a degree proportional to the attacker's motivation. We illustrate this argument via four example applications. Overall, our work can be considered a basis to derive more grounded and realistic assumptions for WSN security and develop cost-effective security solutions to handle application-specific vulnerabilities in WSNs.
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