Monitoring of Wireless Sensor Networks: Analysis of Intrusion Detection Systems

A Wireless Sensors Networks (WSNs) consist of large number of sensor nodes communicating with wireless links to monitor the real-world environment. The openness and hostility of the deployment space as well as the resources limitation, make these networks vulnerable to a wide range of attacks. The main objective of these attacks is to cause a dysfunction of the network. Thus, the security of WSN networks is crucial and represents an important research area. Many security schemes have been proposed. Nevertheless, they cannot guarantee a perfect level of security since they cannot detect all types of attacks. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are required to monitor the WSN network and to strengthen the security mechanisms. In fact, they are used to detect any unusual action occurring in the network and generate an alarm. In this paper, we give an extensive focus on intrusion detection in WSNs. Precisely, a state-of-the-art on the intrusion detection techniques, which can be generally planned in two major classes (signature based IDS and anomaly based IDS), is methodically introduced. Analysis and comparative study on the most relevant mechanisms are also presented, followed by a brief discussion towards the potential research areas in the future.