Improving energy efficiency in distributed intrusion detection systems

Abstract

Recent studies show that malicious traffic has a significant impact on the behavior of networks, thus early dropping of malicious packets could enhance network performance. Furthermore, recent developments in the field of green networking show that it is possible to modulate power consumption according to the traffic level. Intrusion Detection Systems burden the basic routing task with packets inspection; however, traffic reduction could have beneficial results both on network performance and, with next generation routing devices, in network energy consumption. In this paper, we focus on energy consumption and we present an approach to distribute packet inspection over the network nodes, a model to evaluate the changes in network energy consumption according to early or late discovery and discard of rogue packets, and we adopt our technique and model to evaluate by means of simulation how aggressive distributed intrusion detection could be beneficial in terms of network energy savings.