Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) were often used to collect sensitive data and the entire network was particularly vulnerable to various threats at different layers of the protocol stack. With this in mind, there was need to improve security solutions that were inevitable and advantageous to the successful deployment of the wireless sensor networks. The vast research conducted to provide security solutions against various attacks in the WSNs so far was based on the layered approach. In this study, we emphasized that the layered approaches have noticeable shortcomings such as the redundancy and/or inflexibility of the security solutions, which made the layers security solutions often inefficient and inadequate. It was, however, beneficial to construct the security approach for the WSNs based on cross-layer interaction between all components in different layers of the protocol stack. Consequently, these new approaches surely gave a new direction towards the issue of security for wireless sensor networks. The outline of the existing cross layer security schemes in literature was presented, while some new novel security solutions were proposed. More so, the synopsis of the proposed cross-layer based comprehensive security framework (CLBCSF) as the framework model for hierarchical clustering wireless sensor networks was also presented. Nonetheless, the open problems in this area were debated too.

Key words: Immunity cross-layer solutions, wireless sensor networks, layered approach, security, energy efficiency, key management, security framework model, intrusion detection.