A Mobile Agent-Based Method to Counter Sinkhole Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are an applied technology widely used in various areas. According to the WSN limitations, they usually face many types of attacks. The sinkhole attack is the most popular and dangerous attack in the routing of WSNs. There are many approaches to counter sinkhole attacks in the literature. The mobile agent methods generate better results in facing sinkhole attacks and overcoming the WSN limitations. In this paper, we present a new mobile agent-based method that applies the trust value of each sensor to detect and prevent sinkhole attacks. We compute the trust values to inform the sensor nodes about their neighbors' reputations. As shown in the experiments, the proposed method generates better results in packet loss ratio. It also fixes the security flaws of previous works and reduces the agents' overhead in the network compared to previous methods.