Cyber Times International Journal of Technology & Management

An ad hoc wireless sensor network (WSN) provides communication across tiny low power wireless sensor nodes. These sensor nodes (SNs) gather information from physical environment and broadcast that information to other nodes. The WSN is widely used in critical infrastructure surveillance, traffic monitoring, health-care applications, military, forest etc. Today one main problem in WSN is energy wasting at each SNs. while consider sensor nodes, one most important factor is Energy. One new type of Denial of service attack (DoS) is vampire attack, which appear at network layer. It causes to power exhaustion at each sensor nodes and completely disable the network by draining the battery energy of any node. Only one Vampire can raise network power usage by a factor of O (N), where N is the number of nodes in network. This paper aim to describe vampire attack and an approach to detect and prevent from this attack.