Performance evaluation of wireless sensor network under hello flood attack

Abstract

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is highly used in many fields. The network consists of tiny lightweight sensor nodes and is largely used to scan or detect or monitor environments. Since these sensor nodes are tiny and lightweight, they put some limitations on resources such as usage of power, processing given task, radio frequency range. These limitations allow network vulnerable to many different types of attacks such as hello flood attack, black hole, Sybil attack, sinkhole, and many more. Among these attacks, hello flood is one of the most important attacks. In this paper,we have analyzed the performance of hello flood attack and compared the network performance as number of attackers increases. Network performance is evaluated by modifying the ad-hoc on demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol by using NS2 simulator. It has been tested under different scenarios like no attacker, single attacker, and multiple attackers to know how the network performance changes. The simulation results show that as the number of attackers increases the performance in terms of throughput and delay changes.