Abstract: In mobile networks the nodes tend to move as they are not stable. Packet transmission in these networks is carried out by hop to hop packet transmission. During transmission of packets in the Wireless Sensor Network, energy of nodes gets reduced as they require certain energy to receive the packets from source and send it to the proper destination. In some cases the nodes energy is highly used up by the packet when a message is transmitted. This indicates that there may be a presence of malicious nodes in the network. These malicious packets which consume more energy than the energy used up by the honest nodes are termed as “Vampire packets”. The presence of these vampires in the network the energy of the nodes get drained gradually which leads to network failure. If these vampire packets can be detected and avoided, the lifetime of the nodes get increased. This paper deals with the types of vampire attacks and the mechanisms that are proposed to detect and control vampire attack.

Keywords: WSN, Vampire Attacks, Mobile Networks, Vampire packets.