The impact of incapacitation of multiple critical sensor nodes on wireless sensor network lifetime

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are envisioned to be utilized in many application areas such as critical infrastructure monitoring, therefore, WSN nodes are potential targets for adversaries. Network lifetime is one of the most important performance indicators in WSNs. Possibility of reducing the network lifetime significantly by eliminating a certain subset of nodes through various attacks will create the opportunity for the adversaries to hamper the performance of WSNs with a low risk of detection. However, the extent of reduction in network lifetime due to elimination of a group of critical sensor nodes has never been investigated in the literature. Therefore, in this study , we created a novel Linear Programming (LP) framework to model the impact of critical node elimination attacks on WSNs and explored the parameter space through numerical evaluations of the LP model. Our results show that critical node elimination attacks can shorten the network lifetime significantly .