A Sequential Analysis based Approach in Wireless Sensor Networks

Security is crucial for wireless sensor networks deployed in hostile environments. The selection of dropping nodes may be random. Identifying such attacks is very difficult and sometimes impossible. Selective forwarding attack is one such attack which is hard to detect. In this paper, the problem of identifying compromised and packet dropping nodes is considered. Two methodologies are presented and analyzed for this purpose. In the first method, the disconnected nodes are detected. In the second method, properly connected nodes are tested with packet transfer from source node to the destination node to identify the random dropping of nodes. Further an effective method for detecting the selective forwarding attack is proposed called the sequential mesh test which helps in the identification of nodes suffering from this attack. It is shown through experiments that this method. can provide a higher detection accurate rate and a lower false alarm rate than the existing detection scheme.