Robust sensor self-initialization: Whispering to avoid intruders

Abstract

Abstract. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are becoming bigger and with this growth comes the need for new automatic mechanisms for initializations done by hand. One of those mechanisms is the assignment of addresses to nodes. Several solution were already proposed for mobile ad-hoc networks but they either: i) do not scale well for WSN; ii) have no energy constraints; iii) have no security considerations; iv) or have no mechanisms to handle fusion of network partitions. We proposed an address self-assignment protocol which: uses negative acknowledgements and an improved version of a flood control mechanism to minimize the energy spent; uses a technique named whispering to achieve robustness against malicious nodes; and uses private nicknames to handle fusion of network partitions.

A Framework for Robust Address Assignment in WSNs Whispering to Avoid Intruders

“…The 802.15.4 [6] 64 bit unique address is manufacturer specified; thus, it is always available, but the 16 bit address must be derived by a special protocol that ensures its uniqueness within the PAN. Notice that it is not possible to use the random assignment solution, as in IPv6 self-assigned addresses, because the probability of two nodes choosing the same address (a.k.a address collision) is given by the birthday paradox ( ( )) = 1 − ∏ −1 =1 (1 − /2 16 ), in which is a discrete uniform distribution of addresses and is the total number of nodes deployed. As it can be seen in Figure 1, the collision probability is over 10% with only 120 nodes and reaches 50% with ∼300 nodes.…”

“…Addresses are necessary both for identification and routing; however, both global identification and routing are often done with other types of identifiers. Often, the only requirement is that the addresses are locally unique, that is, that only the direct neighbors of each node have distinct addresses [15, 16].…”