AIS for misbehavior detection in wireless sensor networks: Performance and design principles

A sensor network is a collection of wireless devices that are able to monitor physical or environmental conditions. These devices are expected to operate autonomously, be battery powered and have very limited computational capabilities. This makes the task of protecting a sensor network against misbehavior or possible malfunction a challenging problem. In this document we discuss performance of Artificial immune systems (AIS) when used as the mechanism for detecting misbehavior. We concentrate on performance of respective genes; genes are necessary to measure a network's performance from a sensor's viewpoint. We conclude that the choice of genes has a profound influence on the performance of the AIS. We identified a specific MAC layer based gene that showed to be especially useful for detection. We also discuss implementation details of AIS when used with sensor networks.