On the use of Unified And-Or fuzzy operator for distributed node exhaustion attack decision-making in wireless sensor networks

The effect of advances in the fields of ubiquitous computing, wireless communications and embedded system design has seen a corresponding rapid improvement of wireless sensor technology. Sensor networks have emerged as a platform for deployment and sustenance of critical applications that require real-time sensing and data acquisition for decision-making purposes. A significant number of malicious attacks against the security of such networks have been identified in recent times. Considering the untrusted environments of operations of such networks, the threat of distributed attacks against constrained sensory resources i.e. sensor power, computation and communication capabilities cannot be overlooked. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy logic-based approach towards achieving demarkation in the values of specific parameters of an attack detection scheme for detecting distributed node-exhaustion attacks in wireless sensor networks. Using the Unified And-Or (UAO) aggregation operator, we model and formulate a mechanism to achieve a tradeoff between frequent attack detection and sensor node energy utilization. Simulation results prove the effectiveness of our approach in addressing the issue of computing the optimal parameter values for achieving a reasonable tradeoff between attack detection rate and sensor node energy utilization rate.