Healing wireless sensor networks from malicious epidemic diffusion

Leveraging the concept of controlled node mobility in this paper we develop an algorithm for tracking and controlling proximity malware propagation in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Our proposal aims at: (i) notifying the nodes of malware propagation, (ii) leading a flying robot along a path in the WSN that guarantees the minimum recovery time to (iii) heal the infected nodes. We formulate the targeted curing problem as a binary integer problem and determine the optimal solution by a central solver. We use the analytical result as a benchmark to evaluate the recovery time of the proposed solution. The achieved results show a satisfactory performance in terms of tracking the presence of an ongoing epidemic and healing the nodes.