Design of sinkhole node detection mechanism for hierarchical wireless sensor networks

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have several applications ranging from the civilian to military applications. WSNs are prone to various hole attacks, such as sinkhole, wormhole, blackhole, and greyhole. Among these hole attacks, the sinkhole attack is the malignant one. A sinkhole attack allows a malicious node, called the sinkhole node, advertises a best possible path to the base station (BS). This misguides its neighbors to utilize that path more frequently. The sinkhole node has the opportunity to tamper with the data, and it also performs the modifications in messages or it drops messages or it produces unnecessary delay before forwarding them to the BS. On the basis of these malicious acts that are performed by a sinkhole attacker node, we consider three types of malicious nodes in a WSN: sinkhole message modification node (SMD), sinkhole message dropping node (SDP), and sinkhole message delay node (SDL). None of the existing techniques in the literature is capable to handle all three types of nodes at a time. This paper presents a new detection scheme for the detection of different types of sinkhole nodes for a hierarchical wireless sensor network (HWSN). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to design such a detection scheme in HWSNs which can detect SMD, SDP, and SDL nodes. In our approach, the entire HWSN is divided into several disjoint clusters, and each cluster has a powerful high‐end sensor node (called a cluster head), which is responsible for the detection of different sinkhole attacker nodes if present in that cluster. We simulate our scheme using the widely‐accepted NS2 simulator for measurement of various network parameters. The proposed scheme achieves around 95<jats:italic>%</jats:italic> detection rate and 1.25<jats:italic>%</jats:italic> false positive rate. These factors are significantly better than the previous related schemes. Furthermore, the computation and communication efficiency is achieved in our scheme. As a result, our scheme seems suitable for the sensitive critical applications, such as military applications. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.</jats:p>