Collaborative Detection and Agreement Protocol for Routing Malfunctioning in Wireless Sensor Networks

Routing is one of the most important activities performed in a sensor network. Routing nodes can behave either maliciously or may malfunction due to failed system components, affecting the overall network throughput adversely. In this paper, a distributed cooperative routing failure detection mechanism is introduced. The neighbors of a suspected node collaborate with each other to generate consensus about the misbehaving node. A logical tree is formed among the peer nodes to avoid messaging overhead and to allow the final consensus to be notified to every neighbor of the suspect. A simple algorithm for consensus is then presented; every neighbor considers a decision factor for every other neighbor in order to generate a unified agreement about the node under suspicion. We analyze and show that our approach performs better for energy conservation and node lifetime better than previously reported flooding schemes