Breakwaters are used to suppress the energy of waves for providing shelter to coastal and offshore facilities. Very often, the conventional rubble mound breakwaters result in high construction cost and several environmental problems, such as water contamination and wave amplification in front of the structures due to severe wave reflection. One way to alleviate the above-mentioned problem is to appropriately increase the porosity of the breakwaters. This paper aims at developing the optimum design of a porous box-type breakwater comprising multiple scrapped pipelines via physical modelling approach. Herein, the best geometrical design of the breakwater under the governing factors of porosity, width and internal tube length is proposed. A series of experiments have been conducted under the influence of regular wave environment through the analysis of wave transmission, reflection and energy loss. Several geometrical design criteria were derived to maximize the hydraulic performance of the breakwater, when adopted at sites. The proposed breakwater is a reasonably good wave attenuator and anti-reflection structure as well as an effective energy dissipator. © The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2018.