Energy and memory efficient clone detection in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient location-aware clone detection protocol in densely deployed WSNs, which can guarantee successful clone attack detection and maintain satisfactory network lifetime. Specifically, we exploit the location information of sensors and randomly select witnesses located in a ring area to verify the legitimacy of sensors and to report detected clone attacks. The ring structure facilitates energy-efficient data forwarding along the path towards the witnesses and the sink. We theoretically prove that the proposed protocol can achieve $100$ percent clone detection probability with trustful witnesses. We further extend the work by studying the clone detection performance with untrustful witnesses and show that the clone detection probability still approaches $98$ percent when $10$ percent of witnesses are compromised. Moreover, in most existing clone detection protocols with random witness selection scheme, the required buffer storage of sensors is usually dependent on the node density, i.e., $O(\sqrt{n})$ , while in our proposed protocol, the required buffer storage of sensors is independent of $n$ but a function of the hop length of the network radius $h$ , i.e., $O(h)$ . Extensive simulations demonstrate that our proposed protocol can achieve long network lifetime by effectively distributing the traffic load across the network.