A Power-Preserving Broadcast Protocol for WSNs with DoS Resistance

Abstract

Broadcast presents a special challenge for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In some situation such as time synchronization or building routing path, broadcasting messages must be securely transmitted to all nodes, but this process is subject to attack by adversaries. For example, an adversary may try to waste the battery power of intermediate nodes by forcing a compromised node to repeatedly rebroadcast, thus causing a denial-of-service (DoS) attack. One way to solve this problem is use only part of the nodes in the network as the intermediate nodes, limiting the effects of the attack. In this paper, we propose a novel broadcast protocol: broadcast power preserving (BOPP). In BOPP, a packet reception reliability metric of each network component is discovered. This reliability score gives the packet reception rate of each communication edge in the network. With the scoring metric, BOPP can judge the network reliability from time to time and adapt the network to provide maximum reliability while minimizing the energy cost. This enables the network to resist DoS attacks.