Determining Distributions of Security Means for WSNs Based on the Model of a Neighborhood Watch

Abstract

Neighbourhood watch is a concept allowing a community to distribute a complex security task in between all members. Members carry out security tasks in a distributed and cooperative manner ensuring their mutual security and reducing the individual workload while increasing the overall security of the community. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are composed of resource-constraint independent battery driven computers as nodes communicating wirelessly. Security in WSNs is essential to prevent attackers from eavesdropping, tampering monitoring results or denying critical nodes from providing their services and potentially cutting off larger network parts. The resource-constraint nature of sensor nodes prevents them from running full-fledged security protocols. Instead, it is necessary to assess the most significant security threats and implement specialised security solutions. A neighbourhood watch inspired distributed security scheme for WSNs has been introduced by Langendörfer aiming to increase the variety of attacks a WSN can fend off. The framework intends to statically distribute requirement-based selections of online security means intended to cooperate in close proximity on large-scale static homogeneous WSNs. A framework of such complexity has to be designed in multiple steps. We determine suitable distributions of security means based on graph partitioning concepts. The partitioning algorithms we provide are NP-hard. To evaluate their computability, we implement them as 0 – 1 linear programs (LPs) and test them on WSN models generated with our novel $\lambda $ -precision unit disk graph (UDG) generator.

Keywords

• Cooperative security framework
• distributed security means
• graph generator
• linear programming
• neighbourhood watch
• unit disk graphs