Advanced Extremely Efficient Detection of Replica Nodes in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

Today, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely used in many applications including the environment, military, and explorations. One of the most dangerous attacks against these networks is node replication. In this attack, the adversary captures a legal node of the network, generates several copies of the node (called, replica nodes) and injects them in the network. Various algorithms have been proposed to handle replica nodes in stationary and mobile WSNs. One of the most well-known algorithms to handle this attack in mobile WSNs is eXtremely Efficient Detection (XED). The main idea of XED is to generate and exchange random numbers among neighboring nodes. The XED has some drawbacks including high communication and memory overheads and low speed in the detection of replica nodes. In this paper, an algorithm is presented to improve XED. The proposed algorithm is called Advanced XED (AXED) in which each node observes a few numbers of nodes and whenever two nodes meet, a new random number is generated and exchanged. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is evaluated in terms of the memory and communication overheads and its results are compared with existing algorithms. The comparison results show that the proposed algorithm imposes lower overheads to the nodes. In addition, the proposed algorithm is simulated and the simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is able to detect replica nodes faster than XED.