M optimal routes hops strategy: detecting sinkhole attacks in wireless sensor networks

Sinkhole malicious nodes attacks are quite hard to handle in wireless sensor networks, due to the reason that the results of the attacks may cut off the communications by spreading false hops, absorbing data packets. Those terrible attacks are formed from the unique destroying method, which will preferentially destroy the nodes with higher communication function and shorter distance from the Sink node (Base station). In this paper, we propose a secure and energy-efficient detection scheme which can detect the malicious nodes more precisely than the traditional methods. In particularly, a new measure method is introduced in this paper, which is the frequency of each node by establishing M routes with optimal hops from per node to the Sink node. Using the proposed measure and dynamic programming, the malicious nodes can easily tell apart from the network according to the various satisfaction levels and hop difference. Compared with the traditional algorithms, simulation results show that our scheme can significantly promote the detection rate and the false positive rate. The detection rate increased about by 6–30%, the false positive rate decreased about by 5–25%. We also obtain a high energy-saving results in wireless sensor networks.