Enhancing the Security against Flooding Attack in MANET for Medical Application

Abstract

The emerging wireless networks are becoming an essential part of medical solutions due to its increasing accessibility for healthcare professionals/patients by reducing healthcare costs. Hence it is essential to secure the network against attacks most importantly flooding attack that makes the entire network to degrade. In Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET), each and every node act as transmitter and receiver and are assumed working with co-operative nature. There is no base station to control the moving nodes, so there is no security to protect the nodes. Therefore any node in MANET can act as a misbehaving/selfish node that affects the co-operative nature. This becomes hectic when the network is being utilized in medical field to send highly confidential/immediately needed information of patients. Watchdog is a well known mechanism to detect and prevent the selfish nodes. The detection of selfish nodes performed by watchdogs may fail, where it can give false positives and false negatives that can induce to poor performance. This is important on networks that need high security, where sometimes watchdog fails to detect the selfish nodes. In order to avoid these problems, Modified Collaborative Contact based Watchdog (CoCoWa) is designed and the attacker node is detected with reduced overhead. Thus, the proposed work introduces CoCoWa, an approach based on the diffusion of local selfish nodes when a contact occurs, so that information about the selfish nodes is quickly propagated. The collaborative approach is simulated in NS2 and the results are obtained. The important performance metrics such as overhead, end-to-end delay, throughput and packet delivery ratio are taken into consideration for performance evaluation. The overhead is reduced and the other metrics are obtained with increased performance.