What is it about?
The use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has increased rapidly over the last years. Due to their low resources, sensors come along with new issues regarding network security and energy consumption. Focusing on the network availability, previous studies proposed to protect clustered network against denial of service attacks with the use of traffic monitoring agents on some nodes. Those control nodes have to analyze the traffic inside a cluster and to send warnings to the cluster-head whenever an abnormal behavior (e.g., high packets throughput, or non-retransmission of packets) is detected. But if the control nodes (cNodes) die out of exhaustion, they leave the network unprotected.
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Why is it important?
The use of monitoring nodes in a clustered wireless sensor networks represents an efficient and scalable method for detecting denial of service attacks. As monitoring entails a higher energy consumption for the sentry nodes, periodically renewing the set of cNodes is compulsory. So far there has been little work on the detailed implementation of the designation process for this set. In this paper we proposed three different methods to perform the selection of the monitoring nodes in an energy-efficient and secure way. Each method has its pros and cons: random selection is low consuming and easy to set up, but can lead to coverage issues; mechanisms based on residual energy of the nodes, including democratic election process, tend to provide a better load balance over the clusters, but the overall consumption gets higher because of additional security measures that are needed to prevent compromised sensors to monopolize the cNode roles. The selection processes have been extensively tested through simulations, and the numerical results obtained show that effective global consumption and energy balancing correspond to expectations. This leads to the description of the different recommended use cases for each selection process.
Perspectives
Future work may include looking for other possible selection mechanisms so as to improve even more the consumption and the security of the scheme. Working with other detection methods would constitute an interesting approach as well. We also intend to vary the involved network applications so as to obtain clusters with different levels of activity (depending on geographical areas), as well as to use different network topologies. Another angle of approach resides in the use of formal modeling tools, which can be used to represent the system and to extract properties and performance indices about it.
Pr Youcef Hammal
USTHB University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: DoS detection in WSNs: Energy-efficient methods for selecting monitoring nodes, Concurrency and Computation Practice and Experience, September 2017, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/cpe.4266.
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