Secure and efficient disjoint multipath construction for fault tolerant routing in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, reliability is a design goal of a primary concern. To build a comprehensive reliable system, it is essential to consider node failures and intruder attacks as unavoidable phenomena. In this paper, we present a new intrusion-fault tolerant routing scheme offering a high level of reliability through a secure multipath routing construction. Unlike existing intrusion-fault tolerant solutions, our protocol is based on a distributed and in-network verification scheme, which does not require any referring to the base station. Furthermore, it employs a new multipath selection scheme seeking to enhance the tolerance of the network and conserve the energy of sensors. Extensive analysis and simulations using TinyOS showed that our approach improves many important performance metrics such as: the mean time to failure of the network, detection overhead of some security attacks, energy consumption, and resilience.