Secure and Reliable Multisource Multipath Routing in Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks

Multisource multipath data routing to a remote sink node is an effective way to cope with unreliable and/or malicious nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper we analyze the optimal amount of redundancy in terms of the number of source sensors sensing the same physical phenomena and the number of paths through which data are routed to a remote sink node in the presence of unreliable and malicious nodes so that the query success probability is maximized while maximizing the sensor network lifetime. We consider this optimization problem in the case in which a voting-based distributed intrusion detection algorithm is applied to remove malicious nodes from the sensor network. Our model-based analysis results indicate that the optimal multisource multipath redundancy and intrusion detection settings for query-based clustered WSNs exist and such optimal settings evolve dynamically in response to changing environment conditions.