The impact of critical node elimination on the latency of wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have ample applications in a wide range of domains such as health care monitoring, environmental, critical infrastructure, and military applications. These extensive usages of WSNs make them an attractive target for all adversary attacks and natural risks. Although there exist solutions against these threatening attacks, they are not sufficient especially when confronting with extreme environments such as landslides and earthquakes. Detection of sensor nodes that have a major impact on network performance would be of high priority, especially where the speed of data transmission is important. In this paper, we deal with this problem and focus on the identification of those nodes (referred as critical nodes) that, once eliminated or incapacitated, have the most impact on the overall latency of the network. In this context, we propose a novel Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) framework to quantify this impact and explore the parameter space through numerical evaluations of the MIP model. According to our results, critical node elimination attacks can increase the network latency significantly.