On communication security in wireless ad-hoc sensor networks

Networks of wireless microsensors for monitoring physical environments have emerged as an important new application area for wireless technology. Key attributes of these new types of networked systems are the severely constrained computational and energy resources, and an ad hoc operational environment. This paper is a study of the communication security aspects of these networks. Resource limitations and specific architecture of sensor networks call for customized security mechanisms. Our approach is to classify the types of data existing in sensor networks, and identify possible communication security threats according to that classification. We propose a communication security scheme where for each type of data we define a corresponding security mechanism. By employing this multitiered security architecture where each mechanism has different resource requirements, we allow for efficient resource management, which is essential for wireless sensor networks.