GSHMAC: Green and Secure Hybrid Medium Access Control for Wireless Sensor Network

The cost efficiency of wireless platforms and their easy deployment enable the applicability of it in widespread application domains. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are not excluded from it. Their application domains vary from industrial monitoring to military applications. A WSN is a resource-constrained network and energy of the WSN node is a valuable resource. Like every other network, WSNs are also vulnerable to security attacks. A security attack can results in networks consuming more resources, leading to earlier depletion of node energy. A significant part of the resource consumption in a WSN is controlled by the medium access control (MAC) mechanism. This paper focuses on WSN MAC mechanisms and countermeasures for attacks targeting the MAC layer in a WSN. Denial of sleep attacks are the most relevant for WSN MAC as these types of attacks have shattered effects, which bring down the sensor lifetime from years to days. This paper proposes a secure hybrid MAC mechanism, Green and Secure Hybrid Medium Access Control (GSHMAC) to overcome the devastating effect of WSN MAC attacks. The proposed mechanism provides features such as collision threshold-based MAC mode control and countermeasures on WSN MAC using internal MAC mechanisms. GSHMAC shows improved energy-efficiency, delay, and throughput in the presence of attacks, as compared with state-of-art secure MAC mechanisms.