Energy vs. QoS Tradeoff Analysis of Multipath Routing Protocols for Intrusion Tolerance in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper we analyze the tradeoff between energy consumption vs. Quality of Service (QoS) gain in reliability, timeliness, and security in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (HWSNs) utilizing multipath routing to answer user queries in the presence of unreliable and malicious nodes. We formulate the tradeoff as an optimization problem for determining the best redundancy level to apply to multipath routing so that the query response success probability is maximized while prolonging the sensor network lifetime. We consider the optimization problem for the case in which a voting-based distributed intrusion detection algorithm is applied to detect and evict malicious nodes of various types in a HWSN. We identify the optimal redundancy level and intrusion detection setting under which the HWSN lifetime is maximized while satisfying the QoS requirements of query responses in reliability, timeliness and security.