Self-healing wireless sensor networks

Availability is very important for long-term use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), assuming the presence of an attacker. It is thus important to achieve secure communication among WSNs even if some sensor nodes are compromised. Self-healing WSNs possess the feature that a network automatically self-heals after node-capture attacks in order to achieve availability. The self-healing means that the ratio of compromised links decreases with time, even if the attacker corrupts sensor nodes of the network. In this paper, three kinds of self-healing schemes for WSNs are described, a polynomial-based self-healing scheme, a simple random key pre-distribution scheme with self-healing, and a proactive co-operative link self-healing scheme. Our contributions are the self-healing schemes with security evaluation, in which we conduct analytical evaluation and a simulation experiment of our schemes, and results obtained from both analysis and simulations indicate that our schemes are effective in self-healing. Furthermore, comparing three schemes, we clarify each difference and discuss optimal scheme under each different environments. (c) 2015 The Authors. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.