A brief survey of access control in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate applications of access control to Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Although access control was well established for traditional computer systems, it has not been studied thoroughly in WSN environments. We briefly provide the WSN specifications and then stress the constraints of the WSNs that would affect the access control implementation. We also provide a literature overview and discuss further possible solutions. Index Terms—wireless sensor networks, security, access control I. INTRODUCTION Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) continue to grow as one of the most exciting and challenging research areas of engineering. There are many applications of WSNs which are intended to monitor physical and environmental phenomena such as ocean and wildlife, earthquakes, pollution, wild fire, and water quality and also to gather information regarding human activities such as health care, manufac- turing machinery performance, building safety, military surveillance and reconnaissance, highway traffic, etc. WSNs are characterized by severely constrained computational and energy resources, and an ad hoc operational environment. They have unique characteristics such as limited power supplies, low transmission bandwidth, small memory sizes and limited energy; therefore security techniques used in traditional networks cannot be adopted directly. Access control in such a resource constrained WSN with minimum overhead provides significant challenges, and is an ongoing area of research. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section II provides the challenges of access control research in WSNs. Section III reviews related works in the literature. Section IV presents further possible solutions. Finally Section V concludes the paper and outlines future work.