AI-Based Wormhole Attack Detection Techniques in Wireless Sensor Networks

The popularity of wireless sensor networks for establishing different communication systems is increasing daily. A wireless network consists of sensors prone to various security threats. These sensor nodes make a wireless network vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks. One of them is a wormhole attack that uses a low latency link between two malicious sensor nodes and affects the routing paths of the entire network. This attack is brutal as it is resistant to many cryptographic schemes and hard to observe within the network. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the literature on the subject of the detection and mitigation of wormhole attacks in wireless sensor networks. The existing surveys are also explored to find gaps in the literature. Several existing schemes based on different methods are also evaluated critically in terms of throughput, detection rate, low energy consumption, packet delivery ratio, and end-to-end delay. As artificial intelligence and machine learning have massive potential for the efficient management of sensor networks, this paper provides AI- and ML-based schemes as optimal solutions for the identified state-of-the-art problems in wormhole attack detection. As per the author’s knowledge, this is the first in-depth review of AI- and ML-based techniques in wireless sensor networks for wormhole attack detection. Finally, our paper explored the open research challenges for detecting and mitigating wormhole attacks in wireless networks.