Software defined wireless sensor networks security challenges

Abstract

Wireless Sensors Networks (WSNs) have been gaining significant attention in both the industries and the academia in recent years. However, WSN are vulnerable to growing security threats and attacks which are inept for the current traditional security mechanisms to cope with or mitigate such security challenges. As a solution, Software Defined Network (SDN) has emerged and been merged with WSN to form what is known as Software Defined Wireless Sensor Network (SDWSN). SDWSN is introduced to bring flexibility, programmability and innovation to the WSN network. However, SDWSN is not exempted from security challenges. SDWSN is faced with multitude of security challenges inherited from both SDN and WSN which have become a bottle-neck to its operations and applicability. Therefore, this paper presents security challenges in both WSN and SDN which are transferable to SDWSN. We discussed the inheritable security challenges from the perspective of SDN and WSN by outlining several possible threats, attacks and some countermeasures. This is important to bring together these challenges in order to attract or stimulate more research and development activities aim at realizing a more secure and dependable SDWSN.