A Critical Review of Intrusion Detection Systems in WSN: Challenges & Future Directions

Abstract

Since the last decade, with rapid advances in electronics and wireless communication technology, the landscape of wireless sensor network applications has grown to a giant scale. Wireless sensor networks have great potential to be employed in monitoring, tracking, and controlling applications; due to their distinct features such as self-organizing capability, fault tolerance, high sensing power, quick deployment, and less cost. Mission critical WSNs are deployed in inaccessible terrain and communicate over wireless channels, require effective and good security policy. Limited memory, processing power, and communication range are constraints of sensor nodes make prevention based security mechanisms like encryption and authentication technologies, firewall, and cryptography infeasible. As a result, the issue of how to secure such highly vulnerable sensor networks emerges. IDS come into prominence as a second line of defence for such issues. Keeping this in mind, a pervasive review is required to study various IDSs that have been proposed in recent years for WSN to highlight shortfalls they have along with the challenges in designing a lightweight IDS and solutions to set the future research directions in the field of IDS for WSN. Therefore, an extensive study is provided in this review paper into possible directions for future work in intrusion detection involving different aspects in sensor networks.