Intrusion Detection Algorithm for Mitigating Sinkhole Attack on LEACH Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In wireless sensor network (WSN), the sensors are deployed and placed uniformly to transmit the sensed data to a centralized station periodically. So, the major threat of the WSN network layer is sinkhole attack and it is still being a challenging issue on the sensor networks, where the malicious node attracts the packets from the other normal sensor nodes and drops the packets. Thus, this paper proposes an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) mechanism to detect the intruder in the network which uses Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) protocol for its routing operation. In the proposed algorithm, the detection metrics, such as number of packets transmitted and received, are used to compute the intrusion ratio (IR) by the IDS agent. The computed numeric or nonnumeric value represents the normal or malicious activity. As and when the sinkhole attack is captured, the IDS agent alerts the network to stop the data transmission. Thus, it can be a resilient to the vulnerable attack of sinkhole. Above all, the simulation result is shown for the proposed algorithm which is proven to be efficient compared with the existing work, namely, MS-LEACH, in terms of minimum computational complexity and low energy consumption. Moreover, the algorithm was numerically analyzed using TETCOS NETSIM.