Sensors 2016, 16(6), 855; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16060855
Reliability Evaluation for Clustered WSNs under Malware Propagation
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Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shaoxing University, Shaoxing 312000, China
2
College of Mathematics, Physics and Information Engineering, Jiaxing University, Jiaxing 314001, China
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Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA
4
School of Information Technology, Deakin University, Burwood 3125, Australia
5
College of Computer Science and Technology, Donghua University, Shanghai 201620, China
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editor: Rongxing Lu
Received: 21 April 2016 / Revised: 4 June 2016 / Accepted: 6 June 2016 / Published: 10 June 2016
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Security and Privacy in Sensor Networks)
Abstract
We consider a clustered wireless sensor network (WSN) under epidemic-malware propagation conditions and solve the problem of how to evaluate its reliability so as to ensure efficient, continuous, and dependable transmission of sensed data from sensor nodes to the sink. Facing the contradiction between malware intention and continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) randomness, we introduce a strategic game that can predict malware infection in order to model a successful infection as a CTMC state transition. Next, we devise a novel measure to compute the Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) of a sensor node, which represents the reliability of a sensor node continuously performing tasks such as sensing, transmitting, and fusing data. Since clustered WSNs can be regarded as parallel-serial-parallel systems, the reliability of a clustered WSN can be evaluated via classical reliability theory. Numerical results show the influence of parameters such as the true positive rate and the false positive rate on a sensor node’s MTTF. Furthermore, we validate the method of reliability evaluation for a clustered WSN according to the number of sensor nodes in a cluster, the number of clusters in a route, and the number of routes in the WSN. View Full-TextKeywords:
wireless sensor network; reliability evaluation; malware propagation; epidemic theory; continuous-time Markov chain; reliability theory
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Shen, S.; Huang, L.; Liu, J.; Champion, A.C.; Yu, S.; Cao, Q. Reliability Evaluation for Clustered WSNs under Malware Propagation. Sensors 2016, 16, 855.
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