Robust sensor self-initialization: Whispering to avoid intruders

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are becoming bigger and with this growth comes the need for new automatic mechanisms for initializations done by hand. One of those mechanisms is the assignment of addresses to nodes. Several solutions were already proposed for mobile ad-hoc networks but they either: i) do not scale well for WSM; ii) have no energy constraints; iii) have no security considerations; iv) or have no mechanisms to handle fusion of network partitions. We proposed a self-stabilizing address self-assignment protocol which: uses an improved version of a flood control mechanism to minimize the energy spent; and uses a technique named whispering to achieve robustness against malicious nodes.