Published on December 2015 | Wireless Sensor Networks

Surveying the Effect of Vampire Attack in Wireless Ad-hoc Sensor Networks

Ad-hoc low power wireless networks are composed of few to large number of sensor nodes. The energy resources provided for these sensor nodes will be limited. This paper explores a type of resource depletion attacks at routing protocol layer, which are termed as vampire attacks. Vampire attacks are difficult to detect, but easy to carry out. The worst case scenario is that, a single vampire can increase network-wide energy usage by a factor of O(N), where ‘N’ is the number of nodes in the network. In this paper, we make a study with the use of PLGP protocol, which consists of topology discovery and packet forwarding phases and both the phases are prone to vampire attacks. A protocol named PLGPa was implemented with modification that resists the vampire attacks during the packet forwarding phase and in topology discovery phase. This protocol makes use of signature and attestation chains in order to verify that the packets consistently make progress towards destination during transmission.