The Design of a Defense Mechanism to Mitigate Sinkhole Attack in Software Defined Wireless Sensor Cognitive Radio Networks

Abstract

The sink hole attack is a typical wireless sensor network attack. The sink hole node advertises itself as the best route to the sink node or the base station. The nodes in the communication zone of the sink hole node then redirects their observed data to the sink hole node upon receiving the broadcasted supposedly the best route. The sink node receives the packets and then drops them. It can also modify them before relaying them to the sink node or base station. This study proposes a scheme designed to address the effects of the sink hole attack called the Hop Count-Based Detection Scheme for Sinkhole Attack. The performance of the scheme is evaluated using Matlab. The scheme is compared to Ibrahim’s algorithm which is the best algorithm in literature. The simulation results show that HCODESSA achieves good results in comparison to Ibrahim’s. The results show that the sinkhole attack has adverse effect on the performance of the network and that its severity depends on the number of nodes it can mislead. We further evaluated the two schemes using statistical techniques which proved that HCODESSA performs better.