A design for secure and survivable wireless sensor networks

In this article, we present a study of the design of secure and survivable wireless sensor networks (WSN) that has yet to be addressed in the literature. Our goal is to develop a framework that provides the security and survivability features that are crucial to applications in a WSN, because WSNs are vulnerable to physical and network-based security attacks, accidents, and failures. To achieve such a goal, we first examine the security and survivability requirements. We then propose a security and survivability architecture in a WSN with heterogeneous sensor nodes. To understand the interactions between survivability and security, we also design and analyze a key management scheme. The results of the experiment show that a good design can improve both security and survivability of a WSN; however, in some situations, there is a trade off between security and survivability.