A Malicious and Malfunctioning Node Detection Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are often used to monitor physical and environmental conditions in various regions where human access is limited. Due to limited resources and deployment in hostile environment, they are vulnerable to faults and malicious attacks. The sensor nodes affected or compromised can send erroneous data or misleading reports to base station. Hence identifying malicious and faulty nodes in an accurate and timely manner is important to provide reliable functioning of the networks. In this paper, we present a malicious and malfunctioning node detection scheme using dual-weighted trust evaluation in a hierarchical sensor network. Malicious nodes are effectively detected in the presence of natural faults and noise without sacrificing fault-free nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms some existing schemes in terms of mis-detection rate and event detection accuracy, while maintaining comparable performance in malicious node detection rate and false alarm rate.