Unauthenticated event detection in wireless sensor networks using sensors co-coverage

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) offer inherent packet redundancy since each point within the network area is covered by more than one sensor node. This phenomenon, which is known as sensors co-coverage, is used in this paper to detect unauthenticated events. Unauthenticated event broadcasting in a WSN imposes network congestion, worsens the packet loss rate, and increases the network energy congestion. In the proposed method, the more the safe, the less the unsafe (MSLU) method, each secure occurred event must be confirmed by various sensor nodes; otherwise the event is dropped. Indeed, the proposed method tends to forward event occurrence reports that are detected by various sensor nodes. The proposed method is evaluated by means of simulation as well as analytical modeling. A wide range of simulations, which are carried out using NS-2, show that the proposed method detects more than 85% of unauthenticated events. This comes at the cost of the network end-to-end delay of 20% because the proposed method does not impose delay on incoming packets. In addition, the proposed method is evaluated by means of an analytical model based on queuing networks. The model accurately estimates the network performance utilizing the proposed unauthenticated event detection method.