Design of a novel micro‐Zone adaptive Energy‐Trust evaluation Active On‐Demand Vector protocol to optimize communication in challenging and attacked mobile network

Abstract

SummaryHigh congestion, mobility, and energy restrictions are the critical challenges to mobile networks. The conventional routing protocols are unable to ensure effective and reliable communication in such dynamic and unpredictable situations. In this paper, a novel micro‐Zone adaptive Energy‐Trust evaluation Active On‐Demand Vector (mZ‐ETAODV) protocol is designed to provide routing solutions in extreme conditions. In this work, the complete network is divided into smaller zones of nxn. The extreme zone position‐based evaluation is conducted to handle the stability and to identify the next intermediate node. The zone‐covered neighbors are further computed under energy and trust measures to identify the most reliable neighbor. The proposed protocol is simulated under high mobility, congestion and man‐in‐middle attack situations. The analytical observations are recorded in terms of Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) ratio, energy consumption, delay and communication loss parameters. The comparative results are generated against AODV, SAODV, PSAODV, PDS‐AODV, NVS‐AODV, iNVS‐AODV, Tripathy et al., DFMCRP, FBSSR, MBDP‐AODV, AGHA, and Singh et al. protocols. The experimentation is conducted in a highly challenging mobile network with high congestion, high mobility, energy restriction, existence of blackhole, grayhole, DDOS, and mixed attacks. These attacks are performed with 0% to 10% density, and analysis is conducted against PDR ratio, communication delay, route switching, dead node count, remaining energy, and attack detection rate measures. The analysis results identified that the proposed protocol reduced the communication delay and energy consumption and achieved significant gain in attack detection rate, network life and PDR ratio.