Two-tier receiver-initiated secure scheme for hierarchical wireless sensor networks

Security and energy efficiency are important concerns in the wireless sensor network (WSN) design. To save the power and extend the lifetime of WSNs, the duty-cycle based media access control (MAC) protocols are proposed. The well-known security mechanisms usually awake the sensor nodes before they are allowed to execute the security processes. However, the Denial-of-Sleep attacks can exhaust the energy of sensor nodes and shorten the lifetime of WSNs rapidly. Therefore, the existing designs of MAC protocol are insufficient to protect the WSNs from Denial-of-Sleep attack in MAC layer. Most conventional security solutions cannot be directly applied in the WSNs due to the limited power supply. The practical design is to simplify the authenticating process in order to enhance the performance of the MAC protocol in countering the power exhausting attacks. This paper proposes a cross-layer design of receiver-initiated secure scheme integrating the MAC protocol. The analyses show that the proposed scheme can counter the replay attack and forge attack in an energy-efficient way.