A Game Theory Framework to Cooperate Nodes in Malicious Nodes Detection Process in Wireless Sensor Network

Game theory is used as a new approach to model some problems of wireless sensor networks such as routing, data aggregation, and intrusion detection. These networks can be vulnerable to attacks by malicious nodes due to power and memory resource limitations of nodes. These nodes try to disrupt the network with unnecessary consumption of energy. Intrusion detection and prevention is run as a process of monitoring the events occurring in a network by the IDS (Intrusion Detection System). Because of high energy consumption by the IDS, selfish nodes in the cluster are unwilling to be a cluster head and turn IDS on. In this paper, we propose a mechanism based on game theory to enforce nodes to cooperate with other nodes in cluster head election and truthfully reveal their private information including cluster head cost. In this election, we use remaining energy, reputation and distance of node from base station to calculate cluster head cost. After selecting the appropriate cluster head, we propose a game based on BNE (Bayesian Nash Equilibrium) between cluster head and other nodes, such that the CH-IDS (Cluster Head-IDS) agent is not always in ‘on’ state. As a result, the power of CH can be saved. The implementation results show that our proposed mechanism reduces node energy consumption and increases the network life.