Storm Control Mechanism in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks are often used in medical and military applications, therefore it is critical to assure the necessary level of security. Wireless Sensor Networks are especially vulnerable to Denial of Service attacks because of their limited processing capability and memory, and because of the broadcast transmission medium. This paper presents the Storm Control Mechanism that aims at mitigating flooding and Denial of Sleep attacks. The system tracks the frequency of the received packets, triggering an alert when it goes beyond a configured limit. The node tries to send the alert to the base station and then it shuts its wireless transceiver for a predefined period of time. The Storm Control Mechanism has been implemented in TinyOS as a security layer integrated in the communication stack, and the implementation has been tested using TOSSIM.