Sebothoma, Puseletso2025-10-272025-10-272023-06-01https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14519/2265Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degreeMaster of Computing in Information Technology in the Department of Information Technology, Faculty of Information and Communication Technology at the Tshwane University of Technology.In recent years, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been widely used to collect and transmit data. Because these networks are inexpensive and allow easy communication, they are used in a variety of surveillance applications today. The high bandwidth requirements, high power consumption, quality of service (QoS) delivery, data processing and compression techniques, makes the WNSs to be prone to Denial-of-Sleep (DoSL) attacks, and makes it difficult for WSNs to function well. During the DoSL attacks unnecessary fake packets are sent, which completely drains the power supply, thereby shortening the lifespan of the nodes. In addition, these attacks reduces the overall performance of the network. In order to address the identified gaps, this research study integrated existing models, namely, S-MAC protocol, AES algorithm and RSA algorithm when designing the proposed DSD-RSA algorithm. The DSD-RSA algorithm was developed to minimize power consumption and end-to-end delay while maximizing network throughput in WSNs. The Network Simulator-2 (NS-2) was used to simulate and evaluate DSD-RSA against WSN-FAHN and GA-DoSLD. The proposed DSD-RSA algorithm, GA-DoSLD, WSN-FAHN, and GSHMAC algorithms experienced an average throughput of 95%, 89%, and 60%, an average end-to-end delay of 19%, 35%, 40%, and 60%, and average energy consumption of 30%, 35%, 45%, and 50%, respectively. Thus, the proposed DSD-RSA algorithm will find applications in industries, society, and academia due to its superior performance.enCC0 1.0 Universalhttp://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/DSD-RSA.Denial of Sleep attacks.RSA Cryptography.WSN.Thesis