• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.558-564
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• 2013

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) contain limited energy resources and are left in open environments. Since these sensor nodes are self-operated, attacks such as sinkhole attacks are possible as they can be compromised by an adversary. The sinkhole attack may cause to change initially constructed routing paths, and capture of significant information at the compromised node. A localized encryption and authentication protocol (LEAP) has been proposed to authenticate packets and node states by using four types of keys against the sinkhole attack. Even though this novel approach can securely transmits the packets to a base station, the packets are forwarded along the constructed paths without checking the next hop node states. In this paper, we propose the next hop node selection method to cater this problem. Our proposed method evaluates the next hop node considering three factors (i.e., remaining energy level, number of shared keys, and number of filtered false packets). When the suitability criterion for next hop node selection is satisfied against a fix threshold value, the packet is forwarded to the next hop node. We aim to enhance energy efficiency and a detour of attacked areas to be effectively selected Experimental results demonstrate validity of the proposed method with up to 6% energy saving against the sinkhole attack as compared to the LEAP.