A Secure Clustering Protocol with Fuzzy Trust Evaluation and Outlier Detection for Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a secure clustering protocol for Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks that uses fuzzy trust evaluation and outlier detection to enhance security and energy efficiency against malicious attacks.

Contribution

It proposes a novel secure clustering protocol combining fuzzy trust estimation, outlier detection, and energy-aware cluster head election for IWSNs.

Findings

Effective defense against malicious node attacks

Adaptive trust threshold improves security accuracy

Balances energy consumption with security needs

Abstract

Security is one of the major concerns in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs). To assure the security in clustered IWSNs, this paper presents a secure clustering protocol with fuzzy trust evaluation and outlier detection (SCFTO). Firstly, to deal with the transmission uncertainty in an open wireless medium, an interval type-2 fuzzy logic controller is adopted to estimate the trusts. And then a density based outlier detection mechanism is introduced to acquire an adaptive trust threshold used to isolate the malicious nodes from being cluster heads. Finally, a fuzzy based cluster heads election method is proposed to achieve a balance between energy saving and security assurance, so that a normal sensor node with more residual energy or less confidence on other nodes has higher probability to be the cluster head. Extensive experiments verify that our secure clustering protocol can effectively defend the network against attacks from internal malicious or compromised nodes.