Defending Against Resource Depletion Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the major challenges wireless sensor networks face today is security. Wireless Sensor networks are vulnerable to security attacks due to the broadcast nature of the transmission medium. Energy is the most essential resource for sensor nodes. Resource depletion attacks means draining the energy of the nodes by introducing routing loops and stretching the path during packet transmission. Routing protocols are vulnerable to resource depletion attacks. This attack is grouped under vampire attacks. Vampire attacks include carousel and stretch attack. Vampire attacks not only affect a single node but they bring down the entire system by depleting the energy. Secure packet traversal algorithm is developed to avoid vampire attacks. The proposed algorithm increases the network lifetime.