The impact of mitigation of eavesdropping on wireless sensor networks lifetime

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of tiny sensor nodes distributed over a specific geographical area. Eavesdropping can be considered as an attack against WSNs when an adversary node overhears the transmissions among the sensor nodes. Hence a WSN needs to minimize the risk of overhearing in order to operate safely. One of the most important performance metrics of WSNs is network lifetime. Decreasing the transmission power levels of the nodes in order to reduce the overhearing can negatively affect the network lifetime due to the suboptimal routing paths that are used. In this study, two optimization models are developed to jointly reduce eavesdropping and increase the network lifetime. The analysis of the relationship between eavesdropping and network lifetime is investigated by using the proposed optimization models. As a result of this study, it was observed that the minimum reduction of eavesdropping causes a significant decrement in network lifetime and when the overhearing limit is extended to a certain level, the network lifetime converges to the maximum.