Redundancy Management of Multipath Routing for Intrusion Tolerance in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper we propose redundancy management of heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (HWSNs), utilizing multipath routing to answer user queries in the presence of unreliable and malicious nodes. The key concept of our redundancy management is to exploit the tradeoff between energy consumption vs. the gain in reliability, timeliness, and security to maximize the system useful lifetime. We formulate the tradeoff as an optimization problem for dynamically determining the best redundancy level to apply to multipath routing for intrusion tolerance so that the query response success probability is maximized while prolonging the useful lifetime. Furthermore, we consider this optimization problem for the case in which a voting-based distributed intrusion detection algorithm is applied to detect and evict malicious nodes in a HWSN. We develop a novel probability model to analyze the best redundancy level in terms of path redundancy and source redundancy, as well as the best intrusion detection settings in terms of the number of voters and the intrusion invocation interval under which the lifetime of a HWSN is maximized. We then apply the analysis results obtained to the design of a dynamic redundancy management algorithm to identify and apply the best design parameter settings at runtime in response to environment changes, to maximize the HWSN lifetime.