SINKHOLE ATTACK DETECTION IN A WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS USING ENHANCED ANT COLONY OPTIMIZATION

Abstract

ii ABSTRACT Wireless sensor networks (WSN) comprise of tiny sensor nodes that are able to sense and process data. This environment has limitations of low energy, low computational power and simple routing protocols, making is susceptible to attacks such as sinkhole attack. Sinkhole attack occurs when an attacker node in a wireless sensor network disguises itself as the legitimate node closest to the base station, in order to have data sent by a source node to another destination node pass through it, hence having the opportunity to modify, drop or delay data from reaching to the base station as intended. In this thesis, the research developed a sinkhole detection scheme, enhancing ant colony optimization by including a hash table in the ant colony optimization technique to improve sinkhole attack detection and reduce false alarm rate in a wireless sensor network. An increase in detection rate of 96% was achieved and result out performed other related research works when compared and further research discussed.