The impact of incapacitation of multiple critical sensor nodes on wireless sensor network lifetime

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are envisioned to be utilized in many application areas, such as critical infrastructure monitoring, and therefore, WSN nodes are potential targets for adversaries. Network lifetime is one of the most important performance indicators in WSNs. The possibility of reducing the network lifetime significantly by eliminating a certain subset of nodes through various attacks will create the opportunity for the adversaries to hamper the performance of WSNs with a low risk of detection. However, the extent of reduction in network lifetime due to elimination of a group of critical sensor nodes has never been investigated in the literature. Therefore, in this letter, we create two novel algorithms based on a linear programming framework to model and analyze the impact of critical node elimination attacks on WSNs and explore the parameter space through numerical evaluations of the algorithms. Our results show that critical node elimination attacks can significantly shorten the network lifetime.