Optimal Cluster Head Selection Based Energy Efficient Technique for Defending against Gray Hole and Black Hole Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), is prone to various types of attacks and security threats. Due to its dynamic topology, highly decentralized infrastructure and resource constraint sensors, proper energy utilization becomes a challenging issue. Such entities are responsible to make WSNs susceptible to various types of denials of service attacks which results in disastrous consequences like energy-hole creation in the network. Various cluster head selection based energy efficient protocols have been proposed to improve the lifetime of WSNs. In most of the energy efficient techniques, different approaches for energy utilization by sensors are proposed to extend lifetime of WSNs. The earlier scheme is defend against cooperative Gray-Hole and Black-Hole attacks that lead to performance degradation in WSNs containing mobile sensors. In order to overcome this, an energy efficient technique is presented in this paper to mitigate the impact of both kind of attacks simultaneously, on improving cluster head selection mechanism. Here, an energy efficient technique, on detecting and preventing compromised node to be a part on network communication in WSNs. The honest nodes is also determined to entrust as cluster head during packets transmission phase. The simulation results compare proposed protocol with state of the art LEACH protocol, which argues that the proposed scheme effectively minimize the chance of compromised node to become the cluster head and significantly improves network performance using networks dynamics viz. Packet Delivery Ratio(PDR), throughput, end-to-end delay and energy utilization in WSNs.