Securing Cognitive Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have gained a lot of attention recently due to the potential they provide for developing a plethora of cost-efficient applications. Although research on WSNs has been performed for more than a decade, only recently has the explosion of their potential applicability been identified. However, due to the fact that the wireless spectrum becomes congested in the unlicensed bands, there is a need for a next generation of WSNs, utilizing the advantages of cognitive radio (CR) technology for identifying and accessing the free spectrum bands. Thus, the next generation of wireless sensor networks is the cognitive wireless sensor networks (CWSNs). For the successful adoption of CWSNs, they have to be trustworthy and secure. Although the concept of CWSNs is quite new, a lot of work in the area of security and privacy has been done until now, and this work attempts to present an overview of the most important works for securing the CWSNs. Moreover, a discussion regarding open research issues is also given in the end of this work.