A Game Theory Approach to Detect Malicious Nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks has grown a lot in recent years and offers excellent opportunities in defense related applications such as monitoring environment and collecting data related to antisocial activities. Currently, the needs of wireless sensors have become inevitable in daily life. With the continuous growth of wireless sensor networks in daily life, business, and defense applications, the security of transferring data from sensors to their destination has become an important research area. Due to the limitations of power, storage, and processing capabilities, current security mechanisms of wireless networks or wired networks can not apply directly to wireless sensor networks. So there is a need to develop new techniques or modify the current security mechanisms to transfer data from source (from the field) to base station (destination). In this paper, we discuss currently available intrusion detection techniques, attack models using game theory, and then propose a new framework to detect malicious nodes using zero sum game approach for nodes in the forward data path. The first part of research provides the game model with probability of energy required for transferring the data packets. The second part derives the model to detect the malicious nodes using probability of acknowledgement at source.