Owing to the real time applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) including: industrial automation and remote environment monitoring, WSNs have revolutionized today’s infrastructure. While implementing WSNs in strategic areas, security threats have become increasingly prevalent. Security enhancement in WSN by adopting advanced techniques in machine learning is the major focus of this research work. In an effort to discover possible use of Random Forest and Isolation Forest algorithms on them to detect and prevent the attacks, we look into depth of the attack. In this paper, the dataset is pulled from different repositories that are freely available to the public as an initial step followed by various preprocessing techniques. Data cleaning, feature selection, normalization, and categorical variable encoding have been applied as a part of preprocessing. We then observed a general increase in the detection of malicious flows together with the improvement of the tolerance to the simulated attacks. Moreover, we observed how ML enhances the security of WSNs with the combined use of ensemble learning and anomaly detections showing promising approaches and foundations for theoretical and experimental studies. The carried-out experiment proves the efficacy of the Random Forest Classifier (RFC), while maintaining a high level of accuracy, which is 99. 86% compared to 99. 72% before the attack.
Read full abstract