A Light-Weight Countermeasure to Forwarding Misbehavior in Wireless Sensor Networks: Design, Analysis, and Evaluation

Due to the lack of centralized coordination, physical protection, and security requirements of inherent network protocols, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are vulnerable to diverse denial-of-service (DoS) attacks that primarily target service availability by disrupting network routing protocols or interfering with on-going communications. In this paper, we propose a light-weight countermeasure to a selective forwarding attack, called SCAD, where a randomly selected single checkpoint node is deployed to detect the forwarding misbehavior of malicious node. The proposed countermeasure is integrated with timeout and hop-by-hop retransmission techniques to quickly recover unexpected packet losses due to the forwarding misbehavior or bad channel quality. We also present a simple analytical model and its numerical result in terms of false detection rate. We conduct extensive simulation experiments for performance evaluation and comparison with the existing CHEMAS and CAD schemes. The simulation results show that the proposed countermeasure can improve the detection rate and packet delivery ratio (PDR) as well as reduce the energy consumption, false detection rate, and successful drop rate.

I. Introduction

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been receiving a considerable attention as an alternative solution for scalable monitoring and data collection in a hostile or unattended area. A WSN consists of resource-constrained sensor nodes (later nodes) in terms of sensing, computing, or communicating capability. As a part of rapidly emerging Internet of Things (IoT), where a myriad of multiscale nodes and devices are seamlessly blended, WSNs will play an important role in building a ubiquitous computing and communication infrastructure. With the prevalence of cloud, social media, and wearable computing as well as the reduced cost of processing power, storage, and bandwidth, it is envisaged that wirelessly connected smart nodes and devices under IoT will enhance flexible information accessibility and availability as well as change our life further.