Energy Optimised Security against Wormhole Attack in IoT-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

An IoT-based wireless sensor network (WSN) comprises many small sensors to collect the data and share it with the central repositories. These sensors are battery-driven and resource-restrained devices that consume most of the energy in sensing or collecting the data and transmitting it. During data sharing, security is an important concern in such networks as they are prone to many threats, of which the deadliest is the wormhole attack. These attacks are launched without acquiring the vital information of the network and they highly compromise the communication, security, and performance of the network. In the IoT-based network environment, its mitigation becomes more challenging because of the low resource availability in the sensing devices. We have performed an extensive literature study of the existing techniques against the wormhole attack and categorised them according to their methodology. The analysis of literature has motivated our research. In this paper, we developed the ESWI technique for detecting the wormhole attack while improving the performance and security. This algorithm has been designed to be simple and less complicated to avoid the overheads and the drainage of energy in its operation. The simulation results of our technique show competitive results for the detection rate and packet delivery ratio. It also gives an increased throughput, a decreased end-to-end delay, and a much-reduced consumption of energy.