Secure Coverage Control in Wireless Sensor Networks with Malicious Nodes Using Multi-agents

In this paper, a multi-agent coverage control scheme in wireless sensor networks called the Distributed Value Function was integrated with a secure Topology Maintenance Protocol (DVF+TMP). The objective was to achieve a coverage control scheme which maximizes the coverage per unit energy consumed and countermeasures sleep deprivation, snooze and network substitution attacks in WSNs. Simulation results showed that our algorithm was more resilient by consistently attaining higher coverage per unit energy consumed, and achieving up to 75% and 10% of coverage greater than the original DVF algorithm under sleep deprivation and snooze attacks, respectively. Furthermore, the network substitution attack was studied where inaccurate information was exchanged between nodes. The proposed algorithm gained up to 12%, 25% and 8% of coverage than the DVF algorithm for the normal, sleep deprivation and snooze attack, respectively. The proposed algorithm also consistently achieved more average reward per unit energy consumed than the existing algorithm.