Artificial Intelligence-Driven Intrusion Detection in Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Networks: Towards Secure IoT-Enabled Healthcare Systems

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are increasingly deployed in Internet of Things (IoT) systems for applications such as smart transportation, telemedicine, smart health monitoring and fall detection systems for the elderly people. Given that huge amount of data, vital and critical information can be exchanged between the different parts of a WSN, good management and protection schemes are needed to ensure an efficient and secure operation of the WSN. To ensure an efficient management of WSNs, the Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Network (SDWSN) paradigm has been recently introduced in the literature. In the same vein, Intrusion Detection Systems, have been used in the literature to safeguard the security of SDWSN-based IoTs. In this paper, three popular Artificial Intelligence techniques (Decision Tree, Naïve Bayes, and Deep Artificial Neural Network) are trained to be deployed as anomaly detectors in IDSs. It is shown that an IDS using the Decision Tree-based anomaly detector yields the best performances metrics both in the binary classification and in the multinomial classification. Additionally, it was found that an IDS using the Naïve Bayes-based anomaly detector was only adapted for binary classification of intrusions in low memory capacity SDWSN-based IoT (e.g., wearable fitness tracker). Moreover, new state-of-the-art accuracy (binary classification) and F-scores (multinomial classification) were achieved by introducing an end-to-end feature engineering scheme aimed at obtaining 118 features from the 41 features of the Network Security Laboratory-Knowledge Discovery in Databases (NSL-KDD) dataset. The state-of-the-art accuracy was pushed to 0.999777 using the Decision Tree-based anomaly detector. Finally, it was found that the Deep Artificial Neural Network should be expected to become the next default anomaly detector in the light of its current performance metrics and the increasing abundance of training data.