A Polynomial-Based Countermeasure to Selective Forwarding Attacks in Sensor Networks

In data-centric wireless sensor networks (WSN), the malicious nodes may drop some crucial data packets, which serious destroy the network´s data collection and decrease the availability of sensor services. In this paper, we present a lightweight security scheme based on polynomial modeling for preventing selective forwarding attacks. Both theoretical analysis and simulations show that the proposed scheme can alleviate the impact of this type of attack and improve the robustness of the network under conditions of a good tradeoff between the security reliability and the communication overhead. The simulation results show that our scheme can achieve a high success sending ratio in face of a large number of malicious nodes, while the communication overhead can be controlled within reasonable bounds.