External Sinkhole Attack Detection in Large-Scale WSNs Using Metaheuristic Feature Selection

Abstract

Sinkhole attacks in large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs) pose a serious threat to network functionality. This paper presents a metaheuristic feature selection for sinkhole attack detection using the bee swarm optimization (BSO) algorithm. In an external sinkhole attack simulation with 2000 nodes deployed over a 3000 $\times$ 3000 m${}^2$ field, the proposed method achieves a detection accuracy of 0.997 while reducing the 16-feature set to eight features.

Accepted to GCCE 2026; corrected typos