A secure barrier coverage scheduling framework for WSN-based IoT applications

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are network enabling technology for a variety of mission-critical IoT applications. The essential Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of these applications include extended network lifetime, coverage, and connectivity. Barrier scheduling is an efficient energy conservation scheme that can be designed to guarantee these QoS requirements. In barrier scheduling, only a subset of sensor nodes called barriers are activated to conserve energy. The failures of sensor nodes in the barrier can significantly impact the efficacy of barrier scheduling to meet QoS requirements. Faults that cause these failures can be unintentional (software or hardware failures) or intentional (security attacks). Intentional faults are more dangerous than unintentional faults as it can make the entire network utterly dysfunctional at a faster pace. WSNs are easily prone to such intentional faults due to its inherent limitations such as limited battery power, limited bandwidth, unattended deployment, broadcast communication medium, and lack of tamper-proof hardware. This paper proposes a secure barrier coverage scheduling framework that utilizes a novel cluster ensemble approach called KSH in detecting and isolating intentional security faults. The experiment results show that our proposed KSH approach was able to effectively classify and predict the faults with high accuracy and precision.