Accurate Detection of IoT Sensor Behaviors in Legitimate, Faulty and Compromised Scenarios

In smart farming sector, Internet of Things (IoT) based smart sensing systems are vulnerable to failure, malfunction, and malicious attacks. Also, sensors are deployed often in an alien and harsh environment. Here, the conditions are not well supportive which either causes the sensor to fail prematurely or gives unusual and erroneous readings, known as outliers. This effects the smart network's performance and decision-making ability in many ways. Therefore, it is important to accurately detect the IoT sensor behaviour in legitimate, faulty, and compromised or attack scenarios. To distinguish the sensor behaviour in different scenarios we have proposed a feasible approach using spatial correlation theory which is validated using Moran's <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">I</i> index tool. We have used Classification and Regression Trees (CART), Random Forest (RF), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) models to test our approach. For real-time anomaly detection we have used an edge computing technology. We have compared the proposed approach, using Forest Fire real dataset, with the three existing recent works. Our results are promising in terms of accurate detection of IoT sensor behaviours in real-time. This will assist the precision farming industry in making better decisions to securely manage IoT field network, increase productivity, and improves operational efficiency.