# Depletion-of-Battery Attack: Specificity, Modelling and Analysis
## 3 DoB Feasibility and Features  
DoB can be caused by deliberate action or a random combination of circumstances. A random failure of embedded sensor protocols can lead to the scenario of DoB without malware. If a routing algorithm is not energy efficient, remote sensors can be connected by direct links without intermediate nodes. It leads to latency reduction. However, WSN lifetime becomes very short. The considered attack can be organized by relaxed jamming. If a sensor cannot adaptively change transmission power, then the intrusion is equivalent to the well-known DoS attack on WSNs called jamming. Jamming can disrupt wireless connections and can occur either unintentionally (in the form of interference) or through collisions. A jamming attack is usually effective, since expensive hardware is not required in order to launch one. It can be implemented by medium listening and broadcasting on the same frequency band as the sensors, so it can lead to significant effects with small incurred costs for the attacker. If a sensor can counteract noise by increasing transmission power, then the object of the attack becomes the battery of the sensor, wherein the signal quality and transmission range can be increased. The same effect can be caused by malware [16]. Malware can force a sensor to increase transmission power. In addition, malware can block sensors close to sink, so some other node has to increase its communication power without being able to use intermediate link to sink. It is generally assumed that the sensor duty cycle contains a sleep mode. The need to wait for an active slot increases the latency in cases where asynchronous WSN sensors use preamble-based MAC protocols for connection setup and data transmission. It takes a random amount of time, and increases packet delay. The sleep mode can be blocked by malware. If the sleep mode is blocked, packet delay will be reduced. Moreover, increasing node throughput leads to a packet loss rate reduction. Hence, the QoS is improved. However, sensors quickly exhaust their batteries. The details of denial-of-sleep attacks and their impacts on MAC protocols (S-MAC, T-MAC, B-MAC, and G-MAC) are described in [17]. The authors mentioned that an attacked network can maintain throughput and latency similar to that of the network when it is not under attack. Alternative methods for DoB organization can be offered as well. For example, an intruder can organize an infinite session with an attacked node. Vulnerabilities of MAC protocols can be used for frequent wake-up. Implementation of DoB attacks based on excessive transmissions, accompanied with increasing packets latency, is described in [20]. Thus, there are two types of DoB. Attacks of one type lead to QoS degradation and can be considered as the DoS attack, whereas others may improve QoS. Figure 1 shows how DoS and DoB attacks interrelate. The yellow circle represents DoS attacks. Typical examples include Selective Forwarding. Some research [11; 37] on the sensor network threats  
showed that the total number of transmissions is reduced under this attack. Hence, the total energy consumption is generally reduced. In total, Selective Forwarding can improve QoS parameters such as delay and loss rate. However, quality of information degrades; therefore, it is a DoS attack. The blue circle represents DoB attacks. The denial-of-sleep attack can represent the DoB class, when taking into consideration the arguments mentioned above. Another representative of this type of intrusion is DoB caused by excessive power in the transmit signal. The intersection of DoS and DoB is not empty. There is a set of attacks that are common to both DoS and DoB. For example, attacks based on packets flooding (see, for example [38]) lead to buffer overflow in sensors, the low packet delivery ratio, the increased packet latency as well as rash battery exhausting.