Machine Learning-Driven Intrusion Detection for Securing IoT-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Yirga Yayeh Munaye, Abebaw Demelash Gebeyehu, Li-Chia Tai, Zemenu Alem Abebe, Aeneas Bekele Workneh, Robel Berie Tarekegn, Yenework Belayneh Chekol, Getaneh Berie Tarekegn

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become a critical component of modern Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructures; however, their constrained resources and distributed deployment expose them to various cyber threats. In this work, we present a machine learning-driven intrusion detection framework optimized for WSN-based IoT environments. The proposed approach employs the WSN-DS benchmark dataset and integrates adaptive synthetic sampling (ADASYN) to address class imbalance, followed by a hybrid feature selection strategy combining Feature Importance Selection (FIS) and Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) to reduce dimensionality and improve learning efficiency. An XGBoost classifier is then trained using five-fold cross-validation to ensure robust generalization. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly outperforms baseline methods, achieving an overall accuracy of 99.87%, with substantial gains in terms of F1-score, precision, and recall. Comparative analysis against recent WSN-DS studies confirms the effectiveness of combining imbalance correction, optimized feature selection, and ensemble learning. These findings highlight the potential of the proposed model as a lightweight and highly accurate intrusion detection solution for emerging WSN-IoT deployments.