A sensor network is a collection of wireless devices that are able to monitor
physical or environmental conditions. These devices (nodes) are expected to
operate autonomously, be battery powered and have very limited computational
capabilities. This makes the task of protecting a sensor network against
misbehavior or possible malfunction a challenging problem. In this document we
discuss performance of Artificial immune systems (AIS) when used as the
mechanism for detecting misbehavior.
We show that (i) mechanism of the AIS have to be carefully applied in order
to avoid security weaknesses, (ii) the choice of genes and their interaction
have a profound influence on the performance of the AIS, (iii) randomly created
detectors do not comply with limitations imposed by communications protocols
and (iv) the data traffic pattern seems not to impact significantly the overall
performance.
We identified a specific MAC layer based gene that showed to be especially
useful for detection; genes measure a network's performance from a node's
viewpoint. Furthermore, we identified an interesting complementarity property
of genes; this property exploits the local nature of sensor networks and moves
the burden of excessive communication from normally behaving nodes to
misbehaving nodes. These results have a direct impact on the design of AIS for
sensor networks and on engineering of sensor networks.Comment: 16 pages, 20 figures, a full version of our IEEE CEC 2007 pape