HCOBASAA: Countermeasure Against Sinkhole Attacks in Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Cognitive Radio Networks

Software-defined wireless sensor cognitive radio network is one of the emerging technologies which is simple, agile, and flexible. The sensor network comprises of a sink node with high processing power. The sensed data is transferred to the sink node in a hop-by-hop basis by sensor nodes. The network is programmable, automated, agile, and flexible. The sensor nodes are equipped with cognitive radios, which sense available spectrum bands and transmit sensed data on available bands, which improves spectrum utilization. Unfortunately, the Software-defined wireless sensor cognitive radio network is prone to security issues. The sinkhole attack is the most common attack which can also be used to launch other attacks. We propose and evaluate the performance of Hop Count-Based Sinkhole Attack detection Algorithm (HCOBASAA) using probability of detection, probability of false negative, and probability of false positive as the performance metrics. On average HCOBASAA managed to yield 100%, 75%, and 70% probability of detection.