Centralized Routing Protocol for Detecting Wormhole Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSN) are resource and energy-constrained because they are generally batteries powered and therefore have limited computational capability. Due to the less secure environment in WSN, some malicious nodes at one point can tunnel packets to another location to damage the network in terms of packets dropping and eavesdropping and this is a so-called wormhole attack. Many of the current protocols solve the wormhole attack problem in isolation from the node energy consumption. However, some other proposed solutions consider reducing the energy consumption to detect such attacks but still it is needed to probe better performance. In this paper, we present a lightweight multi-hop routing protocol for 802.15.4 WSN that aims to minimize the energy consumption and also to detect the wormhole attacks. Simulation results prove that our MAC Centralized Routing Protocol (MCRP) outperforms other existing similar protocols.