Novel Approach to a Plant Inspired Distributed Security Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency is a key factor for the longevity of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Most representatives of the plants have evolved to be highly energy-efficient in their survival strategies, despite their limited resources. Plants have to deal with a variety of threats originating from different herbivores and microbial pathogens while handling a number of abiotic stress factors. For plants and WSNs, different defence mechanisms impose different fitness costs and therefore the costs and benefits have to be well-balanced. This way, plants are able to not only conquer a large variety of different attacks but also handle several different simultaneous attacks adequately. To react early and adapt to upcoming threats, plants within a network are capable of signalling each other within a certain distance about ongoing attacks. The biological strategies of plants in terms of signalling and defence, as well as their energy and resource limitations, share significant similarities with WSNs. This study aims to explore these similarities and demonstrates the correspondence between the biological concepts and WSNs. Additionally, we present a novel approach to enhancing security in WSNs through a cooperative distributed security scheme inspired by key factors of plant defence mechanisms, with the goal of reducing the energy constraints and maximising the longevity of the network.