Identifying and Isolating Aberrant Nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks consist of many tiny nodes operating in a variety of environments. These nodes are small, inexpensive devices that have constraints in coverage, bandwidth, storage resources, communications ability and processing power. Therefore, traditional, valid cryptographic algorithms such as asymmetric key encryption are not suitable to operate on such networks where security requirements are of crucial importance. This raises serious concerns on finding methods to protect the sensor nodes from adversaries and to quickly segregate those that have been attacked. To address the security vulnerabilities of sensor nodes in a sensor network, this paper proposes a lightweight security protocol to identify and isolate aberrant sensor nodes in a wireless sensor network.