A novel zone based routing protocol for detection of replicas in static wireless sensor networks

As sensor nodes in a wireless network are tiny, very small, low-cost and deployed in an unattended environment, they are easily prone to many kinds of serious attacks. One such attack is Node Replication attack, where the attacker creates multiple clones /replicas of the legitimate node and deploys them at various paths in the network. As these replicas behave exactly like legitimate node, it is very difficult to detect them in the network. The presence of replicas mainly aims at disrupting the services of the network, thereby decreasing the performance of the same. Many research works have been carried out to detect the replicas in the network, but still each of the mechanisms have some push-backs. This paper mainly analyses the use of a Zone based routing protocol(ZRP) for Clone detection and how effectively routing can be done even in the presence of a clone in the network. Also it discusses how the performance of the network can be maintained even in the presence of the clone in the network.