Vampire Attacks in Wireless Ad-hoc Networks

Wireless Adhoc Netwroks

A Wireless Ad-hoc Network (WSN) consists of self-powered sensor nodes. These nodes are deployed in infrastructure less mode to collect the useful information from the environment and transmit it to sink node. Monitoring of environmental conditions such as rainfall, humidity, temperature, head of an active volcano, etc. and monitoring of friendly forces, opposing forces and various attacks, etc. in the military are some of the activities of sensor nodes (Maraiya et. al., 2011; Enami et. al., 2010). Sensor networks allow the nodes to communicate wirelessly, hence avoiding the expensive wired system. The wireless medium may include radio frequencies, infrared, optical medium. Sensor nodes consist of radios that can transmit, receive and can stay in idle and sleep modes. The radio should not be kept in idle mode completely in order to prevent power consumption. They should get shut down completely when they are idle (Jangra et. al., 2010). Sensor Networks provide the ability to operate devices such as actuators, motors and switches that control conditions and provide efficient and reliable communications.

Energy Consumption In Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks

As shown in Figure 1 Sensor nodes carry out three main functions i.e. data acquisition, processing, and transmission. Out of these three functions data transmission consumes more energy as energy is wasted for transmitting and receiving the data packets. The sensor nodes will also play the role of a router: receive the data from other nodes and forwards the same towards base stations. The routing process that is part of data transmission also consumes a major portion of the energy. Data processing also consumes energy because of calculation operations but it is comparatively low. Acquisition consumes almost negligible energy (Kumar, et.al, 2012).

Figure 1.

Functionalities of a sensor node that consume energy