Modeling the Spread of Worm Epidemics in Wireless Sensor Networks

The dramatic increase in the number of sensors with wireless communication capability has resulted in the emergence of a new class of computer worms which specifically target such sensors networks. The most striking feature of worm in these networks is that they do not require Internet connectivity for their propagation but can spread directly from a sensor node to another sensor node using a short-range radio communication technology. In this paper, we model and analyze the spread of worm in wireless sensor networks using the epidemic theory. From numerical simulation results, we observe that the process of worm propagation is very sensitive to the density of nodes, the energy consumption of nodes and the sleep and work interleaving schedule policy for nodes. Therefore, our simulation study can provide insight into deriving a formal model to characterize worm propagation in sensor networks.