Dynamic tunnel routing for reliable and resilient data forwarding in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic routing strategy called tunnel routing that enables efficient and resilient data forwarding from sensors to a destination in wireless sensor networks. Instead of establishing a single static path, tunnel routing identifies a set of trusted sensor nodes that form a tunnel between the source and the destination. Terminals in the tunnel cooperate with each other to reliably route data and to defend against compromised nodes that may maliciously drop or re-direct packets. To achieve this, not only do sensor terminals forward data, but also they act as support nodes, providing on-demand retransmissions in order to combat channel fading, and initializing multi-path data forwarding towards the destination in case they detect a misbehavior of a forwarding node. Simulation results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed scheme.