Investigating the Sinkhole Attack in CognitiveWireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a network that senses its environment, collects data, and routes data to sink node through wireless links. However, security is a challenge. Sinkhole attack is one of the main security issues that threatens the operation ofWSN. Sinkhole nodes advertise themselves as best link route to the base station for malicious reasons. Thereafter, the attacker drops packets and modifies data, enabling other attacks such as selective forwarding and worm-hole attacks to be launched. This study focusses on investigating the effectiveness of sinkhole attack mitigation schemes in cognitive WSN and designed a framework for future research. MATLAB simulation tool was utilized to simulate and evaluate the sinkhole attack mitigation schemes, and comparative results were generated. Themetrics whichwere considered in the simulation are the packet delivery ratio, probability of detection, and the probability of false alarm. The results show that the mitigation of sinkhole attacks requires further attention.