Challenges in Sinkhole Attack Detection in Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN’s) comprise limited energy small sensor nodes having the ability to monitor the physical conditions and communicate information among the various nodes without requiring any physical medium. Over the last few years, with the rapid advancements in information technology, there has been an increasing interest of various organizations in making the use of wireless sensor networks (WSN’s). The sensor nodes in WSN having limited energy detects an event, collect data and forward this collected data to the base node, called sink node, for further processing and assessment. Few attributes of WSN’s like the energy consumption and lifetime can be impacted by the design and placement of the Sink node. Despite various useful characteristics WSN’s is being considered vulnerable and unprotected. There is a large class of various security attacks that may affect the performance of the system among which sinkhole an adversary attack puts dreadful threats to the security of such networks. Out of various attacks, a sinkhole attack is one of the detrimental types of attacks that brings a compromised node or fabricated node in the network which keeps trying to lures network traffic by advertising its wrong and fake routing update. Sinkhole attacks may have some other serious harmful impacts to exploit the network by launching few other attacks. Some of these attacks are forwarding attacks, selective acknowledge spoofing attacks, and they may drop or modify routing information too. It can also be used to send fake or false information to the base station. This study is analyzing the challenges with sinkhole attacks and exploring the existing available solutions by surveying comparatively which used to detect and mitigate sinkhole attacks in the wireless sensor network.