The Efficacy of Epidemic Algorithms on Detecting Node Replicas in Wireless Sensor Networks

• Main Authors: Narasimha Shashidhar, Chadi Kari, Rakesh Verma
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2015-12-01
• Series: Journal of Sensor and Actuator Networks
• Subjects: replica detection; duplicate detection; wireless sensor networks; emergent algorithms; epidemic gossip
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/2224-2708/4/4/378

A node replication attack against a wireless sensor network involves surreptitious efforts by an adversary to insert duplicate sensor nodes into the network while avoiding detection. Due to the lack of tamper-resistant hardware and the low cost of sensor nodes, launching replication attacks takes little effort to carry out. Naturally, detecting these replica nodes is a very important task and has been studied extensively. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed, randomized sensor duplicate detection algorithm called Discard to detect node replicas in group-deployed wireless sensor networks. Our protocol is an epidemic, self-organizing duplicate detection scheme, which exhibits emergent properties. Epidemic schemes have found diverse applications in distributed computing: load balancing, topology management, audio and video streaming, computing aggregate functions, failure detection, network and resource monitoring, to name a few. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first attempt at exploring the potential of this paradigm to detect replicas in a wireless sensor network. Through analysis and simulation, we show that our scheme achieves robust replica detection with substantially lower communication, computational and storage requirements than prior schemes in the literature.