Routing Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is an emerging technology now-a-days and has a wide range of applications such as battlefield surveillance, traffic surveillance, forest fire detection, flood detection etc. But wireless sensor networks are susceptible to a variety of potential attacks which obstructs the normal operation of the network. The security of a wireless sensor network is compromised because of the random deployment of sensor nodes in open environment, memory limitations, power limitations and unattended nature. This paper focuses on various attacks that manifest in the network and provides a tabular representation of the attacks, their effects and severity. The paper depicts a comparison of attacks basis packet loss and packet corruption. Also, the paper discusses the known defence mechanisms and countermeasures against the attacks. Keywords— wireless sensor network, security, attacks, defence