A Contents-Based Anomaly Detection Scheme in WSNs

In many applications, wireless sensor networks could be thought as data-centric networks, and the sensor nodes are densely distributed over a large sensor field. The sensor nodes are normally vulnerable in terms of security since they are very often deployed in a hostile environment and open space. In this paper, we propose a scheme for contents-based anomaly detection in wireless sensor networks. In this scheme we use the characteristics of sensor networks where several nodes surrounding an event point can simultaneously detect the phenomenon occurring and the contents detected from these sensors are limited to inside a certain range. The proposed scheme consists of several phases; training, testing and refining phases. Anomaly candidates detected by the distance-based anomaly detection scheme in the testing phase are sent to the refining phase. They are then compared in the sink node with previously collected data set to improve detection performance in the refining phase. Our simulation results suggest the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in this paper evidenced by the improvements of the detection rate and the false positive rate.