The security problem in wireless sensor networks faces severe challenges, due to the openness of the sensor network channel and the mobility and diversity of the terminals. When facing randomly located eavesdroppers, the situation is much more complex. This paper studies the security performance of a wireless sensor network where randomly located passive and active eavesdroppers are both considered. Compared to a passive eavesdropper, an active eavesdropper can perform both eavesdropping and malicious jamming simultaneously in a wireless sensor network. Based on beamforming and artificial noise (AN), we propose a practical way to defend against the eavesdropper by establishing a protecting region. An appropriate metric, the hybrid outage probability, which takes both the transmission outage probability and the secrecy outage probability into consideration, is utilized to evaluate the security performance. In addition, the concept of safe transmission range is defined to evaluate the security performance. Simulation results are provided to depict the insecure region and verify the harm of the active eavesdropper to the transmission in the wireless sensor network.
Keywords: eavesdropper; insecure region; outage probability; physical layer security.