Malicious Impact Mitigation by Index-Modulation for Decisions Gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks

In target detection applications, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) report binary decisions about the absence/presence of a target to a Sink Node (SN) in order to make a global decision and take an appropriate action. However, as these networks are extremely vulnerable to malicious attacks, their performance could be significantly degraded. Index-Modulation (IM) based approach seems to own a security merit where nodes' decisions are not entirely exposed, but hidden with the indices of transmitting devices. This, to a large extent, will limit malicious nodes from deceiving local decisions and therefore mitigate their overall impact on the global decision. In this paper, IM as a secured physical layer transmission approach in WSNs is introduced. Simulation and analytical results have highlighted the robustness of IM schemes against different numbers and variations of malicious attacks comparing to their counterparts of non-IM schemes.