EACK: End-to-End Acknowledgement-Based Method for Reliable Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks

Reliability is the vital requirement in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Most routing protocols in WSNs assume that every node in the network is trustworthy. However, due to the open medium, the wide distribution, and the lack of nodes´ physical protection, attackers can easily compromise WSNs by inserting misbehaving nodes, black hole attacks, into the network. In this paper a special end-to-end acknowledgment-based method, named EACK, for reliable data collection in WSNs is developed that, contrary to existing methods, resists collusion black hole attacks without using public-key cryptography, independent of MAC layer protocol, and does not need node-disjoint paths. Analytical and simulation results demonstrate that the EACK considerably decreases the network overhead and increases the packet delivery ratio compared to the existing methods.