Defending against data forwarding misbehavior in sensor networks by quasimultipath technique: models and simulation

Malicious nodes dropping data packets is a serious security problem in a multihop sensor network because the misbehavior obstructs the mission of sensor networks for collecting and sending data to sinks. In this paper, we propose the quasimultipath data forwarding scheme. If a data packet is discarded by an adversarial node, the quasimultipath scheme enables a benign node in the network to retransmit the packet to a different neighbor node to bypass the adversarial node. In quasimultipath, we introduce a new mechanism of differential timeout to enable energy efficient retransmission against adversary dropping packets. To evaluate the performance, we model and simulate the defense against attacks. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme circumvents adversaries and achieves several-fold reduction in sensor node energy cost, compared to the state-of-the-art multipath method.