The inhibition and clearup of the mobile worms in wireless sensor networks

The network performance of WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks) can be improved significantly by injecting mobile elements. However, the infection process of worm will be greatly accelerated once the mobile element has been captured and become the new infection source. To cope with this new threat, this paper first proposes the infection model for the networks with the mobile worm and designs a heuristic algorithm to identify the boundary of infected area. High risk nodes near the boundary can be found and switched to sleeping states to block the further spreading of the worm. Second, an algorithm with directed-diffusion based anti-worm is designed to repair those infected sensors. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed methods can achieve better worm cleaning effect with low cost, which can be applied to energy-limited wireless sensor networks.