A Survey on Security and Privacy Protocols for Cognitive Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have emerged as an important and new area in wireless and mobile computing research because of their numerous potential applications that range from indoor deployment scenarios in home and office to outdoor deployment in adversary’s territory in a tactical battleground. Since in many WSN applications, lives and livelihoods may depend on the timeliness and correctness of sensor data obtained from dispersed sensor nodes, these networks must be secured to prevent any possible attacks that may be launched on them. Security is, therefore, an important issue in WSNs. However, this issue becomes even more critical in cognitive wireless sensor networks (CWSNs), a type of WSNs in which the sensor nodes have the capabilities of changing their transmission and reception parameters according to the radio environment under which they operate in order to achieve reliable and efficient communication and optimum utilization of the network resources. This survey paper presents a comprehensive discussion on various security issues in CWSNs by identifying numerous security threats in these networks and defense mechanisms to counter these vulnerabilities. Various types of attacks on CWSNs are categorized under different classes based on their natures and targets, and corresponding to each attack class, appropriate security mechanisms are presented. The paper also identifies some open problems in this emerging area of wireless networking research.