A Survey of Game Theory in Wireless Sensor Networks Security

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are becoming an integral part of our lives. There are not widespread applications of WSNs without ensuring WSNs security. Due to the limited capabilities of sensor nodes in terms of computation, communication, and energy, providing security to WSNs is challenging. In fact, the process of implementing WSNs security is adaptive and dynamic, which evolves continually. The essence of attack-defend in WSNs security can be expressed by mutual strategies of interdependence while game theory can be used for the purpose of accounting for interactions among strategies of rational decision makers. Therefore, studying WSNs security with game theory has higher scientificity and rationality. This paper presents a survey of security approaches based on game theory in WSNs. According to different applications, a taxonomy is proposed, which divides current existing typical game-theoretic approaches for WSNs security into four categories: preventing Denial of Services (DoS) attacks, intrusion detection, strengthening security, and coexistence with malicious sensor nodes. The main ideas of each approach are overviewed while advantages and disadvantages of various approaches are discussed. Then, this paper overviews related work and highlights the difference from other surveys, and points out some future research areas for ensuring WSNs security based on game theory, including Base Station (BS) credibility, Intrusion Detection System (IDS) efficiency, WSNs mobility, WSNs Quality of Service (QoS), real-world applicability, energy consumption, sensor nodes learning, and expanding game theory applications and different games. Thus, a global view of WSNs security approaches based on game theory is provided. To our best knowledge of knowing, it is the first paper centrally focusing on game theory in WSNs security. It will make the researchers a better understanding of game-theoretic solutions to WSNs security and further research directions.