Continuous Cascading Failures of Wireless Sensor Networks Under a Novel Sequential Attack Strategy

As wireless sensor networks (WSNs) become extensively interconnected and exposed to threats, they exhibit vulnerability to cascading failures. Existing studies primarily focus on cascades triggered by simultaneous attack and assume that subsequent failure propagation evolves in discrete time steps. In practice, attackers orchestrate attacks as a dynamic sequence with stochastic timing to maximize their impact on network vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, failure propagation exhibits continuous‐time dynamics. To fill these gaps, we examine continuous cascading failures in WSNs under a novel sequential attack strategy and evaluate the resulting network vulnerability. The modeling begins with a transmission‐constrained WSN. Subsequently, a continuous cascading failure process is proposed, considering sequential attack modeled by a homogeneous Poisson process. To mitigate the failures triggered by such attacks, a latency‐congestion‐sensitive routing (LCSR) scheme is designed to redistribute load. In the case study, we compare cascading failure outcomes induced by sequential attack with those resulting from simultaneous attack. Results show that the former causes less initial damage but more severe long‐term network degradation. Moreover, sequential attack rate affects network lifetime. Additionally, the proposed LCSR strategy outperforms single‐aspect routing strategies in reducing network vulnerability. Finally, increasing node capacity mitigates cascading failures, while increasing edge capacity prolongs network lifetime.