Reliability Evaluation for Clustered WSNs under Malware Propagation.
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.
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shaoxing University, Shaoxing 312000, China. shigens@126.com.|College of Mathematics, Physics and Information Engineering, Jiaxing University, Jiaxing 314001, China. shigens@126.com.
Shigen
S
Shen
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shaoxing University, Shaoxing 312000, China. hlj_jlh@163.com.
Longjun
L
Huang
College of Mathematics, Physics and Information Engineering, Jiaxing University, Jiaxing 314001, China. ljh_541@163.com.
Jianhua
J
Liu
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA. champion@cse.ohio-state.edu.
Adam C
AC
Champion
School of Information Technology, Deakin University, Burwood 3125, Australia. syu@deakin.edu.au.
Shui
S
Yu
College of Computer Science and Technology, Donghua University, Shanghai 201620, China. caoqiying@dhu.edu.cn.
Qiying
Q
Cao
continuous-time Markov chain; epidemic theory; malware propagation; reliability evaluation; reliability theory; wireless sensor network