MAC Routing Protocol for Improving Efficiency in IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) are made of a number of nodes (aka., source nodes) and switches, which can communicate with each other through wireless channels. The infrastructureless nature and architecture of WSN makes it flexible and scalable but the nodes in this network are resource and energy constrained. In this paper we describe the design of a centralized MAC routing protocol (MCRP) to help improve the performance, the network lifetime and to detect wormhole attacks in 802.15.4 wireless sensor networks. A Wormhole attack occurs when an intruder creates a low latency tunnel between two or more sensor nodes to misguide other nodes and exhaust network resources by gaining access to sensitive data. Hence, we designed and implement a routing protocol that considers both performance and energy factors while detecting wormhole attacks. Experimental results from simulations carried out in NS-3 show that our proposed protocol exhibits a reduction in energy consumption of 54% and 42% over LEACH and LEACH-C, respectively. MCRP further improves the performance of the network in terms of propagation delay and packet loss ratio even as the number of nodes increases.