Anomaly detection in beacon-enabled IEEE 802.15.4 wireless sensor networks

Abstract

During the past decade, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have evolved as an important wireless networking technology attracting the attention of the scientific community. With WSNs being envisioned to support applications requiring little to no human attendance, however, these networks also lured the attention of various sophisticated attackers. Today, the number of attacks to which WSNs are susceptible is constantly increasing. Although many anomaly detection algorithms have been developed since then to defend against them, not all of them are tailored to the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, a dominant communication standard for low power and low data rate WSNs. This paper proposes a novel anomaly detection algorithm aimed at securing the beacon-enabled mode of the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol. The performance of the proposed algorithm in identifying intrusions using a rule-based detection technique is studied via simulations.