Impact of Jellyfish attack on routing protocols in TCP-based MANETs

Abstract

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are self-organized infrastructure-less network of mobile wireless devices that could be deployed for communication. Due to the insecure wireless communication medium, multi-hop routing communication process, and dynamic behavior of the nodes in MANETs, routing protocols are vulnerable to various security attacks, such as Jellyfish attacks. A Jellyfish node targets TCP-based MANET and exploits its working mechanism to degrade the communication performance. This attack is hard to detect since it is a TCP protocol compliant methodology.In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the Ad hoc on-demand vector (AODV), Dynamic source routing (DSR), Temporally ordered routing algorithm (TORA), Geographic routing protocol (GRP), and optimized link state routing (OLSR) routing protocols under the Jellyfish delay variance attacks for TCP-based MANETs. Further, the TAHOE, RENO, and SACK variants of TCP protocol are considered for comparison. These routing protocols are simulated using the OPNET simulator to compare their performance, using specific performance metrics on the network. The experimental results show that the AODV protocol performs better than the DSR, TORA, OLSR, and GRP protocols under the jellyfish delay variance attack. Further, the SACK TCP variant performs better than the other TCP variants under the Jellyfish delay variance attack.