AWISSENET: Setting up a secure Wireless Sensor Network

Ad-hoc wireless sensor networks (AWSN) are quickly gaining popularity due to the fact that they are potentially low-cost solutions that can be used in a variety of application areas including emergency response, medical monitoring, homeland security and environmental monitoring. On the other hand, AWSN introduce severe node resource constraints due to their lack of data storage capabilities, power limitation, low bandwidth, restricted transmission range. All these factors represent major obstacles to the implementation of traditional security techniques in AWSN. In this paper, we present AWSN security and operational requirements, sensor node constraints affecting security requirements and finally the goals of AWISSENET, an EU funded project aiming at further securing AWSN.