SNR based digital estimation of security in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Security in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is usually thought as privacy, auditing, intrusion detection and protection. In general, the quality of signal processing is considered as issue of middleware layers. The higher values of signal to noise ratio (SNR) are vital for target detection and estimation which is the most critical objective of WSN. Despite of the fact that SNR has a significant impact on objectives of WSN, not much investigation is found in literature about SNR and its security impact on such networks. The entire WSN can be rendered as useless due to SNR degradation and therefore, SNR is a prevailing security threat in WSNs. In the light of modern concepts of security, the safety should accompany the availability, scalability, efficiency and the quality parameters of inter-node communication. We show that SNR can identify suspicious activities which can exploit the performance and quality of communication in a sensor network. Also, by varying range of transmission radii and observing its impact on SNR we demonstrate that SNR-values, SNR-variance and pre-defined network threshold of SNR-variance, together can be useful in security assessment of WSN. © Institute for Computer Science, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2009.