Improvisation of ad hoc on demand distance vector routing protocol to mitigate certain attacks of network layer in mobile ad hoc network

Abstract

MANETs have been receiving substantial attention as a part of next generation technologies. MANETs do not depend on any fixed infrastructure and there is no centralised administration in MANET. Nodes communicate directly with other mobile nodes in its range and the nodes act as both host and router for forwarding and routing packets. MANETs are widely used in Battlefields, Vehicular communications, Emergency rescues, Conferences or Meetings, Connecting medical devices, etc. Few inherent features of MANET such as dynamic network topology, lack of centralized administration, dependency on other peer nodes for routing, etc., makes it vulnerable to more types of attacks. Many challenges are faced by MANETs in routing, network connectivity, security, limited energy, constrained operations and so on. When security critical operations are performed using MANET, like Military operations and Emergency services, security plays a vital role. Enforcing security in Ad hoc networks, is difficult than in traditional networks as malicious nodes can easily be injected into MANET and it is also hard to find and isolate these misbehaving nodes. Security goals of MANET are Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability, Authentication and Non-Repudiation. This research focus on network layer attacks because the probability of Denial of Service attack is more in this case. Since nodes are mobile in nature, a study on prediction of node mobility ayer security attacks that are considered for this research are categorized as Routing Service Degradation attack, Selective Data Dropping attack and Energy Consumption attack. Wormhole attack is a type of routing service degradation attack where the malicious nodes form a tunnel between them and informs the source node that it has a faster and fresh route to the destination. They create a new route by modifying RREQ and RREP packets of AODV. Smart Monitoring Agents for Reliable Transmission (SMART) protocol has been proposed to counter the Wormhole attack to detect these misbehaving nodes. SMART protocol achieves routing security with 36% increase in packet delivery ratio than standard AODV and also achieves 32% reduction in packet loss rate than AODV. The proposed protocol improves the attack detection rate and accuracy by 34% when compared with AODV protocol under varying number of attacker nodes. newline