An efficient and sustainable self-healing protocol for Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Due to the unattended operation nature, nodes in Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are susceptible to physical attacks. Once a sensor is compromised, the adversary will be able to learn all its secrets. While some previous works tried to address the node self-healing issue in UWSNs, little effort has been devoted to ensure the sustainability of node self-healing. In this paper, we present a novel sustainable node self-healing protocol for UWSNs. We generate unpredictable random data for key update and thus the node self-healing capability doesn't decrease when the number of attack rounds increases. We show both analytically and through simulation experiments that our protocol provides efficient and sustainable node self-healing capabilities with small overheads.