A sequential mesh test based selective forwarding attack detection scheme in wireless sensor networks

It is very difficult to distinguish between selective forwarding attacks and normal packet drops in wireless sensor networks. In order to detect selective forwarding attack effectively, we propose the sequential mesh test based detection scheme in this paper. The cluster head node detects the packet drop nodes based on the sequential mesh test method after receiving the packet drop reports. This scheme extracts a small quantity of samples to run the test, instead of regulating the total times of test in advance. It decides whether continue the test or not based on the test result until it obtains the final conclusion. We show through experiments that our scheme can provide a higher detection accurate rate and a lower false alarm rate than the existing detection scheme. Meanwhile, it requires less communication and computation power and shorter detection time to detect the selective forwarding attack nodes.