Secure target detection and tracking in mission critical wireless sensor networks

Target tracking is one of the important applications for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that are deployed into a remote and hostile environment. In such environments, sensor nodes may be compromised by intruders to distort the integrity of data by sending false data reports, injecting false data during target tracking, and disrupting transmission of sensed data. For mission critical WSNs, such as border protection systems, the result of above attacks may be catastrophic. In this paper, we propose a secure and reliable target tracking protocol that considers security and target tracking tasks simultaneously. The basic idea behind the proposed protocol is to ensure tracking security using trust concept for individual sensor nodes. The performance evaluation results show that the use of proposed protocol allows the network to retain the trustworthiness of data even in the presence of compromised nodes thereby achieving secure and reliable target tracking process.