Performance analysis of LEACH protocol under Denial of Service attacks

Nowadays, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) services are applied in many civilian and military scenarios. This has initiated various security threats, especially in unattended environments. Low Energy Aware Cluster Hierarchy (LEACH) is one of the most popular hierarchical routing protocols in WSN that consumes limited energy; thus increases the network lifetime. The security of data transfer via WSN is a challenging issue, especially with the existence of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. The contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, experimental analysis of the impact of existing DoS attacks on the performance of LEACH protocol, including Flooding attack, Black hole attack and Gray Hole attack will be presented. Secondly, a new DoS attack on LEACH called Scheduling attack will be introduced. In order to check the reliable operation of LEACH routing protocol, all attacks mentioned above are implemented and their impacts on the performance of the LEACH in terms of different metrics including packet delivery ratio, network lifetime and energy consumption have been evaluated.