Optimal quarantining of wireless malware through power control
M. H. R. Khouzani, Eitan Altman, Sunetra Sarkar · 2009
The topic of malware propagation in mobile wireless networks is gaining momentum among the research community, as actual vulnerabilities are revealed through recent outbreaks of worms. We introduce a defense strategy that quarantines the malware by reducing the communication range. This counter-measure faces us to a trade-off: reducing the communication range suppresses the spread of the malware, however, it also negatively affects the performance of the network as the end-to-end communication delay increases. We model the propagation of the malware as a deterministic epidemic. Using an optimal control framework, we select the optimal communication range that captures the above trade-off by minimizing a global cost function. Using Pontryagin's Maximum Principle, we derive structural characteristics of the optimal communication range as a function of time for two different cost functions.