Improved Sensed Data Dependability and Integrity in Wireless Sensor Networks

The mainspring of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is to capture data from an interesting deployment area and sending them out to the end user. However, one can ask to what extent the end user can have confidence in the use of these data? Especially when these collected data are employed in a crucial application that definitely excludes wrong data use. Thereby, WSN mission success is basically dependent on trustworthy of the data delivery process to the end user. To reach this goal, some obstacles, related to malicious node behavior or failure nodes, must be avoided or tolerated. Therefore, we propose, in this paper, a scheme to improve the dependability of the data sensed by sensor nodes in one hand and the reliable communication of these data to the sink in other hand. The proposal is based on a fault tolerant sensing process and the resilience to malware threat on the transmitted data from nodes to sink. The proposal was integrated to the well know Leach protocol and the performance evaluation, carried out on NS2 simulator, showed convincing results in terms of energy conserving, received data rate and node failure occurrence and attack detections.