Towards effective en-route filtering against injected false data in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), attackers could inject false data into the networks by compromising the sensor nodes. False data injected by the compromised nodes, if undetected, could not only cause false alarms but also consume the limited energy of the sensor nodes, posing serious threats to the lifetime of networks. To mitigate this type of attacks, a number of en-route filtering schemes to filter false data inside the networks have been developed in the past. However, there is lack of a systematical strategy to evaluate those schemes and establishing a foundation for designing en-route filtering techniques. To address these issues, we compare the pros and cons of the existing enroute filtering schemes. To fairly compare the performance of those schemes, we conduct theoretical analysis and derive a set of closed formulae for them. Our extensive simulations validate our findings. Our research summarizes the state-of-art research development and lay out future directions in this area.