SEIF: Secure and Efficient Intrusion-Fault Tolerant Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, reliability represents a design goal of a primary concern. To build a comprehensive reliable system, it is essential to consider node failures and intruder attacks as unavoidable phenomena. In this paper, we present a new intrusion-fault tolerant routing scheme offering a high level of reliability through a secure multi-path communication topology. Unlike existing intrusion-fault tolerant solutions, our protocol is based on a distributed and in-network verification scheme, which does not require any referring to the base station. Furthermore, it employs a new multi-path selection scheme seeking to enhance the tolerance of the network and conserve the energy of sensors. Extensive simulations with Tiny OS showed that our approach improves the overall Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) while conserving the energy resources of sensors.