CL-MLSP: The design of a detection mechanism for sinkhole attacks in smart cities

This research aims to represent a novel approach to detect malicious nodes in Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) within the next-generation smart cities. Smart city applications have a critical role in improving public services quality, and security is their main weakness. Hence, a systematic multidimensional approach is required for data storage and security. Routing attacks, especially sinkholes, can direct the network data to an attacker and can also disrupt the network equipment. Communications need to be with integrity, confidentiality, and authentication. So, the smart city and urban Internet of Things (IoT) network, must be secure, and the data exchanged across the network must be encrypted. To solve these challenges, a new protocol using CLustering Multi-Layer Security Protocol (CL-MLSP) with AODV has been proposed. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm is aligned with the proposed protocol for encryption and decryption. The shortest path is obtained by the clustering method based on energy, mobility, and distribution for each node. Ns2 is used to evaluate the CL-MLSP performance, and the parameters are network lifetime, latency, packet loss, and security. We have compared CL-MLPS with ECP-AODV, Probe, and Multi-Path. The proposed method superiority rates in energy consumption, drop rate, delay, throughput, and security performance are 6.54%, 12.87%, 8.12%, 9.46%, respectively.