Anomaly-Based Intrusion Detection System in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Machine Learning Algorithms

Abstract

One of the most significant issues in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is security, which must be addressed to keep WSNs safe from malicious attacks. An intrusion detection system (IDS) is essential in analyzing network traffic and detecting abnormal events. However, these IDSs suffer from several drawbacks that affect their effectiveness and flexibility in accuracy, so they must overcome these drawbacks to improve the performance of IDS. These drawbacks include difficulties in determining the appropriate dataset, the problem of feature selection, and the issue of the imbalanced dataset and choosing the appropriate algorithms for the classification process in WSN. In this paper, a model for an anomaly-based IDS in WSNs is proposed. This model applied mutual information (MI) for feature selection and the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) for solving the imbalanced dataset problem. It used different machine learning (ML) algorithms, random forest (RF), decision tree (DT), support vector machine (SVM), and K-nearest neighbors (KNNs) to analyze network traffic and binary classification or multiclass classification. To implement and evaluate the performance of the proposed model, the standard dataset NSL-KDD is used. Python language is used to implement the proposed model in the Anaconda platform, and many evaluation metrics are also utilized to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed model can detect intrusions using different ML algorithms with high accuracy. The results of the proposed model for different ML algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art algorithms, and the maximum enhancement reached 15% in the accuracy metric.