MAC Layer DoS Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are very popular area of interest both in academic studies and industrial applications since they can work individually without additional maintenance and can be deployed in diverse applications. However, the limited source of the nodes cannot guarantee a sufficient level of security and also complicates the design and the implementation of the algorithms/protocols. In the WSN, Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols have a special significance that it helps maintaining the communication resources effectively. In this paper, we have summarized the Denial of Service (DoS) attacks threatening MAC protocols followed by an investigation on protocols designed against to DoS attacks and finally open research issues have been studied on secure MAC designs.