## 7 Conclusions and Future Work  
This paper explored the development of an energy efficient IDS for packet-dropping attacks in WSNs through following the SDLC phases, processes, and techniques. Moreover, this paper studied  
Figure 16: Detection report. Figure 15: Monitoring report. the absence of the SE practices and their effect on the overall results and in the development process such as missing requirements and inconsistency in the testing process and measures. This research started by presenting the methodology followed in this research. The purpose of this research is mainly to address the lack of SE practices applied in the field of WSNs in general and in the development of IDSs in particular. Applying proper SE process models while developing IDSs for WSNs will provide efficient, accurate detection services for security attacks in their applications. An IDS for WSN was chosen to analyze the missing SE phases in the current IDSs. Then, the SE Spiral model with its four phases: \"Determine Objectives and Constraint\", \"Identify Risks and Alternatives, \"Develop and Verify\", and \"Plan Next phase\", was proposed and applied. Consequently, this study developed a new enhanced version of an IDS through following the SDLC phases [Spiral model] to detect Blackhole attacks with high efficiency in terms of energy consumption and network lifetime. To explore the SE need more, three different IDS designs were proposed to illustrate the effect of software design, development, and testing on the IDS performance results. Then, the developed IDSs were tested and validated through simulation modeling using NS2 simulator. Lastly, conclusions were drawn from the results' comparisons and analyses performed. The results of the three suggested designs: Scheduling, Broadcasting, and Watchdog, with respect to the evaluation metrics, revealed that Watchdog design was the best design among the three suggested designs. The Scheduling design comes afterwards and then the Broadcast design. The Broadcast design was an inefficient design as it has a lot of message transmission overhead, causing the nodes to lose their energy over message passing. In terms of energy consumption, the Watchdog succeeded to save up to 20% of the network energy more than the other two designs. Moreover, it prolonged the network lifetime by increasing the time of the first node to die by 15.5% and 66.87% in comparison to Scheduling and Broadcasting designs, respectively. Additionally, Watchdog increased the time of last node to die by up to 73% compared to Broadcasting design. This shows how effective considering and deploying the SE processes is while developing new or enhanced IDSs--not only to enhance the performance of the IDSs, but also to help other researchers and developers get enough details to understand how current IDSs were designed, implemented, and tested to reuse them and to have a fair comparison with them. This was one of the main contributions that this research has participated in and accomplished. In addition to all IDS enhancements mentioned in this study, there are still more valuable enhancements that are important to mention as further research including:  
* Performing extensive performance analysis on different test scenarios, such as considering external intruders, larger sample size of WSNs, and advanced attackers that have more energy than normal nodes. * Enhancing the detection process by making it more scalable to detect Black hole attacks at the SCH level. * Detecting other types of attacks such as Grayhole attacks. * Eliminating all network collisions to prevent triggering false positive alarms throughout the attack detection process. Conceptualization, I.A. ; methodology, I.A. ; software, A.A.; validation, I.A. and A.A.; formal analysis, I.A. and A.A.; investigation, I.A. and A.A.; data curation, I.A. and A.A.; writing--original draft preparation, A.A.; writing--review and editing, I.A. and A.A.; visualization, I.A. and A.A.; supervision, I.A. ; project administration, I.A. and A.A.; funding acquisition, I.A.