SBGR: A Simple Self-Protected Beaconless Geographic Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks

In geographic routing a node forwards data packets to a neighbor which is closer to the destination than itself. However, most of the existing geographic routing protocols have not been designed to work effectively in scenarios with malicious nodes. Some protocols use cryptographic schemes, reputation schemes and other sorts of complex and costly (especially for a wireless sensor network) solutions to provide security to the routing protocols. Moreover, these schemes are not able to deal with attacks from legitimate nodes compromised (insider attacks). We analyze in detail the effects of insider attacks (Sybil and Sinkhole) in beaconless geographic routing protocols and propose a Self-Protected Beaconless Geographic Routing (SBGR) protocol. We show that by just enhancing the forwarding logic of our routing protocol to make additional transmissions when suspicious traffic is detected, we can deal with these insider attacks without the extra cost and overhead of deploying complex reputation systems. Our simulations show that SBGR outperforms existing solutions and achieves nearly a 100% packet delivery ratio with a very low additional overhead.