Routing Security in Wireless Sensor Networks

Since routing is a fundamental operation in all types of networks, ensuring routing security is a necessary requirement to guarantee the success of routing operation. Securing routing task gets more challenging as the target network lacks an infrastructure-based routing operation. This infrastructure-less nature that invites a multihop routing operation is one of the main features of wireless sensor networks that raises the importance of secure routing problem in these networks. Moreover, the risky environment, application criticality, and resources limitations and scarcity exhibited by wireless sensor networks make the task of secure routing much more challenging. All these factors motivate researchers to find novel solutions and approaches that would be different from the usual approaches adopted in other types of networks. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive treatment of the routing security problem in wireless sensor networks. The discussion flow of the problem in this chapter begins with an overview on wireless sensor networks that focuses on routing aspects to indicate the special characteristics of wireless sensor networks from routing perspective. The chapter then introduces the problem of secure routing in wireless sensor networks and illustrates how crucial the problem is to different networking aspects. This is followed by a detailed analysis of routing threats and attacks that are more specific to routing operation in wireless sensor networks. A research-guiding approach is then presented to the reader that analyzes and criticizes different techniques and solution directions for the secure routing problem in wireless sensor network. This is supported by state-of-the-art and familiar examples from the literature. The chapter finally concludes with a summary and future research directions in this field.