Using Quantum-inspired Tabu Search Algorithm with Logic Operation and Moving Average Indicator for Wormhole Attack Detection in a WSN

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are composed of multiple sensor nodes which communicate with each other and one or more base stations wirelessly, and are applied in many fields, including military, ecological and environmental monitoring. However, the wormhole attack problem is a significant security issue in WSNs. The wormhole in the attack consists of one or more pairs of malicious nodes. They will receive and transmit the information of the neighbor node through a special tunnel to other wormhole nodes. This may result in many problems, such as packet routing errors, reduced node lifetimes and even damage the entire network topology. This paper improves a defense method that utilizes the neighbor information collected by mobile nodes without extra hardware, complex calculation or increased resource consumption. A moving average indicator combined with logic operation, the proposed method applies a Quantum-inspired Tabu Search (QTS) algorithm to effectively find combinations enabling the detection of wormholes. Finally, the experimental results show that the proposed method only uses the number of neighbors and can still effectively detect wormhole attacks.