Recursive‐clustering‐based approach for denial of service (DoS) attacks in wireless sensors networks

This paper presents a novel approach for detecting denial of service attacks. In particular, the concern is on the sleeping deprivation attacks such as the malicious nodes that use flooding technique. Our approach is based on wireless sensor network (WSN) clustering. It consists in recursively clustering sensors until a required granularity (chosen by the expert) is achieved. We apply our approach with two different clustering algorithms. Indeed, we use the common clustering WSN algorithm Low Energy Algorithm Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy and the general clustering method Fast and Flexible Unsupervised Clustering Algorithm (FFUCA) based on ultrametric properties. We discuss the behavior of the approach with the two algorithms. Also, we present numerical results that show the efficiency of recursive clustering using the FFUCA algorithm. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.