Abstract
Cloud computing has a great potential to assist in storing and processing data collected from sensors placed in any environment such as smart homes, vehicles, hospitals, enemy surveillance areas, volcanoes, oceans, etc. The sensors may be implanted in the form of a body sensor network or placed in the surroundings. The data recorded by these sensors may further be used for several applications implemented in the cloud as well as other services. Here, the data is acquired from sensors through the wireless medium. Recent studies show that wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are vulnerable to various kinds of security threats and there is a requirement of a security solution that safeguards them from lethal attacks. In this paper, we modify the low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) protocol for WSNs and add the functionality of intrusion detection to secure WSNs from sinkhole, black hole, and selective forwarding attacks. The modified protocol is called LEACH++. We perform two types of analyses: numerical analysis to check the effect on throughput and energy, and simulations in Network Simulator-2 (NS-2) to prove the results found from the numerical analysis. The results are quite promising and favor LEACH++ over LEACH under attack with respect to throughput and energy consumption.