Performance measurement of ad-hoc sensor networks under threats

Abstract

Current security mechanisms in ad-hoc sensor networks do not guarantee reliable and robust network functionality. Even with these mechanisms, the sensor nodes could be made nonoperational by malicious attackers or physical break-down of the infrastructure. Measurement of the network characteristics in a 'threat' of network failure is essential to understand the behavior of these networks. The two main contributions of this paper are the analysis of performance variation and measuring the after-effects of the threats to a sensor network i.e. threat of node failures, attack on nodes etc. Two metrics, connectivity cost and dis-connectivity co-efficient; the former studies the variation in performance when a network topology is subject to different threats, while the later measures the impact of the threat(s) on the sensor network. Simulations are performed on dynamic network models vulnerable to adversarial and non-adversarial threats as in any practical deployment scenario. Results show that robustness and fault-tolerance of the sensor network topologies comes as a trade-off with the vulnerability of the network topologies to various threats.