Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks at Network Layer in WSN

Recent advancements in technology, tiny size, cost effectiveness have made sensors as a crucial part of real world sensitive applications. These sensor nodes are scattered over an area to monitor the situations like fire, flood and record the data and to forward meaningful data to the center head node for observation, resulting an advance prompt to control the situation. In last decade, WSN have grown significantly in variety of areas and applications, resulted the high, consistent security mechanism. Also, there is variety of attacks on WSN at their different layers of architecture. Though sensor nodes are not capable enough in terms of power, processing etc. but applications based on these sensors demand on-time collection of information or data and then to send same on reliable, secure delivery medium. Small sensors with limited hardware, processing cannot afford traditional security mechanisms to face or sustain the attacks. There is variety of attacks at different layers of WSN architecture to affect sensor‟s roles like signaling, framing, transmission etc. Many Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are identified at each layer of WSN which are purposeful, planned attacks to hamper the availability of service, restricting the sensor node‟s utility for problem solution. In this paper we will focus on the WSN architecture, characteristics, constraints and various types of DoS attacks primarily on physical and data link layer and particularly at network layer in details with some suggestions against attacks.