MPBSD: A moving target defense approach for base station security in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

This paper addresses one major concern on how to secure the location information of a base station in a compromised Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). In this concern, disrupting or damaging the wireless base station can be catastrophic for a WSN. To aid in the mitigation of this challenge, we present Moving Proximity Base Station Defense (MPBSD), a Moving Target Defense (MTD) approach to concealing the location of a base station within a WSN. In this approach, we employ multiple base stations to serve a WSN where one of the multiple base stations is elected to serve the WSN in a specific period of time. Specifically, our approach periodically changes the designation over a period of time to provide obscurity in the location information of the base station. We further evaluate MPBSD using a real-world testbed environment utilizing Wi-Fi frequencies. Our results show that MPBSD is an effective MTD approach to securing base stations for a WSN in term of sensory performance such as end-to-end delay.