An Immuno-Inspired Approach to Misbehavior Detection in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Abstract: We propose and evaluate an immuno-inspired approach to misbehavior detection in ad hoc wireless networks. Node misbehavior can be the result of an intrusion, or a software or hardware failure. Our approach is motivated by co-stimulatory signals present in the Biological immune system. The results show that co-stimulation in ad hoc wireless networks can both substantially improve energy efficiency of detection and, at the same time, help achieve low false positives rates. The energy efficiency improvement is almost two orders of magnitude, if compared to misbehavior detection based on watchdogs. We provide a characterization of the trade-offs between detection approaches executed by a single node and by several nodes in cooperation. Additionally, we investigate several feature sets for misbehavior detection. These feature sets impose different requirements on the detection system, most notably from the energy efficiency point of view.