Defending against Malicious Threats in Wireless Sensor Network: A Mathematical Model

Wireless Sensor Networks offer a powerful combination of distributed sensing, computing and communication. They lend themselves to countless applications and at the same time constrained by limited battery life, processing capability, memory and bandwidth which makes it soft target of malicious objects such as virus and worms. We study the potential threat for worm spread in wireless sensor network using epidemic theory. We propose a new model Susceptible- Exposed-Infectious-Quarantine-Recovered with Vaccination (SEIQRS-V), to characterize the dynamics of the worm spread in WSN. Threshold, equilibrium and their stability are discussed. Numerical methods are employed to solve the system of equations and MATLAB is used to simulate the system. The Quarantine is a method of isolating the most infected nodes from the network till they get recovered and the Vaccination is the mechanism to immunize the network temporarily to reduce the spread worms.

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