Analysis of the Authenticated Query Flooding Protocol by Probabilistic Means

Secure multicast communication is an elementary mechanism in the field of wireless sensor networks, addressing a number of security means and algorithms. Since this security is inherent with the scarce resource of energy, the endeavour in this context is to maximise security while being energy conscious and aware depending on the level of intrusion. This paper analyses the energy consumption of a secure authenticated query flooding protocol as proposed by Zenaida et al., (2006) with a formally probabilistic analysis on the basis of DTMCs. By the use of formal methods we compute for different topologies the intrinsic energy use depending on the level of intrusion. The novelty when choosing the concept of formal methods in the field of wireless sensor networks is the precision of the results. As in simulation series of experiments have to be repeated many times to reach a desired degree of confidence, the presented formal approach is computing these results with a high precision.