A Cross Layer Energy Efficient Security Mechanism for Denial of Sleep Attacks on Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor networks are particularly exposed to several kinds of attacks. Due to resources constrained property in WSN, Denial of sleep attacks is recognized as one of the most serious threats. Attacks of this type exhaust power supply of sensor nodes and reduce the sensor lifetime. Most of existing researches propose authentication and encryption solutions to protect the network from denial of sleep attacks. However, it is more efficient to use simpler solutions to the same security challenges due to limited processing capability, memory storage, and energy capacity. In this paper we propose a cross layer energy-efficient security mechanism to protect the network from these attacks. Simulation reveals that our proposal is energy efficient and able to achieve significant performance in term of preventing network nodes from different denial of sleep attacks.