NRE: Suppress Selective Forwarding attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Selective Forwarding (SF) attacks impact the data transmission integrity by not forwarding a subset of received packets from time to time. The 'selective' characteristic makes SF attacks hard to be distinguished from the normal packet drops or poor receptions in a volatile wireless environment. To understand this stealthy attack, an analytical model is developed to estimate the wellness of a node's forwarding behavior. Further analysis examines the cases where multiple nodes launch SF attacks in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), where we borrow the idea of the PageRank algorithm to estimate the most susceptible nodes to SF attacks in a network. Based on the analyses, we develop a novel reactive routing scheme that bypass suspicious nodes by estimating parent node's reliability and link quality in an integrated manner. The proposed scheme is compared to traditional approaches that also use the Node Reliability Estimator (NRE). The simulation results show that the bypass scheme provides resilience to SF attacks by achieving over 95% data delivery ratio (DDR) consistently and signif cantly outperforms the baseline Collection Tree Protocol and other algorithms without incurring additional overhead across a comprehensive set of test scenarios.