Abstract
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are vulnerable to computer viruses. To protect WSNs from virus attack, the virus library associated with each sensor node must be updated in a timely way. This article is devoted to developing energy-efficient patching strategies for WSNs. First, we model the original problem as an optimal control problem in which (a) each control stands for a patching strategy, and (b) the objective functional to be optimized stands for the energy efficiency of a patching strategy. Second, we prove that the optimal control problem is solvable. Next, we derive the optimality system for solving the optimal control problem, accompanied with a few examples. Finally, we examine the effects of some factors on the optimal control. The obtained results help improve the security of WSNs.
Highlights
Smart sensor nodes, which are low-power devices equipped with a set of sensors, a processor, a memory, a power supply, a radio, and an actuator, can sense, measure, and gather information from the environment
To enable a Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to automatically defend against virus attack, all sensor nodes in the network must be equipped with an intrusion response system (IRS)
We model the efficient patching (EEP) problem as an optimal control problem we refer to as the EEP model in which (a) each control stands for a patching strategy, and (b) the objective functional to be optimized stands for the energy efficiency of a patching strategy
Summary
Smart sensor nodes, which are low-power devices equipped with a set of sensors, a processor, a memory, a power supply, a radio, and an actuator, can sense, measure, and gather information from the environment. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which are self-organized wireless networks of smart sensor nodes, are used to cooperatively transmit the sensed data to the base station [1]. WSNs have important applications in many fields, ranging from military target surveillance and natural disaster relief to human health monitoring and hazardous environment exploration [2,3,4]. As WSNs are typically deployed in uncontrollable or even hostile environments, they are vulnerable to a wide range of cyberattacks. A cyber malefactor may launch a virus attack to the target WSN and perform intended malicious operations on each infected sensor node, ranging from stealing or falsifying the data in this node to destroying the node [5,6]. Protecting WSNs from virus attack has long been a major issue in the domain of cybersecurity [10]
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