Analysis of AODV protocol under sinkhole attack in wireless sensor network

Abstract

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSNs) is a collection of number of sensor nodes which are left open in an unsecured environment. Sensor nodes work and communicate together to attain the desired goals. They are placed at the locations where monitoring is otherwise impossible. Wireless Sensor Networks are resource constrained which may be computational power, memory capacity, battery power etc. As Wireless Sensor Networks are implemented in the unattended environment, they are prone to discrete type of security attacks. Because of their limitations these networks are easily targeted by intruders. Sinkhole attack is one of the security attacks which try to disturb the ongoing communication in wireless sensor network. In sinkhole attack, the intruder or the malicious node try to attract the network traffic towards itself, that sensor nodes will pass data packets through this compromised node thereby manipulating messages which sensor nodes are transferring to the base station. In this paper we analyze the impact of Sinkhole attack on AODV protocol under various conditions. We analyzed the impact of Sinkhole attack on AODV protocol with varying number of attacker nodes.