A mobility optimized SPRT based distributed security solution for replica node detection in mobile sensor networks

Sensor networks are normally deployed in uncontrolled environments which may result in an adversary compromising a small number of nodes and making identical replicas of the same. This allows the attacker to launch a variety of attacks on the network, having compromised only a few nodes. Several replica detection schemes have been proposed in the literature for static sensor networks. However these schemes cannot be extended for mobile sensor networks, as they rely on static sensor locations. For mobile sensor networks, few solutions have been proposed but they are either centralized approaches or burden the network with high communication and other overheads. We propose a distributed scheme, optimized by nodes’ velocities, using the Sequential Probability Ratio Test. Leveraging the intersection of message transmission paths, it can handle high mobility while at the same time guarantee uniqueness for each node without the involvement of the base station. Moreover, this scheme does not use explicit packets for the purpose of detecting replicas. Instead the periodic data packets transmitted by the sensor nodes are used. The system overheads are also reasonable and node velocities improve the system performance rather than diminish it.