Fuzzy logic based multi-criteria decision-making using Dubois and Prade's operator for distributed denial of service attacks in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have emerged as an important technology for monitoring of critical situations that require real-time sensing and data acquisition for decision-making purposes. Security of wireless sensor networks is a contemporary challenging issue. A significant number of various types of malicious attacks have been identified against the security of WSNs in recent times. Due to the unreliable and untrusted environments in which WSNs operate, the threat of distributed attacks against sensory resources such as power consumption, communication, and computation capabilities cannot be neglected. In this paper, a fuzzy logic based approach is proposed in the context of distributed denial of service attacks in WSNs. The proposed approach is modelled and formulated as multi-criteria decision-making problem, while considering attack detection rate and energy decay rate as the two decision criteria. Using the Dubois and Prade's fuzzy operator, a mechanism is developed to achieve the best trade-off between the two aforementioned conflicting criteria. Empirical analysis proves the effectiveness of the proposed approach.