Reducing Resource Wastage by Preventing the Occurence of Flood Attack in Delay Tolerant Networks

Abstract

Delay Tolerant Networks helps to provide communication between the nodes in some network scenarios where discontinuous connectivity and frequent partitions are highly possible. Security is a major threat in such type of networks. This network involves several types of attacks. One of the major attacks that affect Delay Tolerant Network is Flood attack. Due to the shortage of network resources, Delay Tolerant Networks are liable to flood attack wherein the attackers will launch several packets into the network, to overuse the available limited network resources and to degrade the network performance. A Count Restricting Approach is employed to reduce the occurrence of flood attack in Delay Tolerant Networks, in which each node will have a boundary value over the total number of packets to be generated where the limit value is determined by the Rate Limit Certificate which is issued by a Trusted Authority. The node which transmits packets within its count limit will be considered as normal node else the node will be found as an attacker node. Cluster Heads are elected to crosscheck the count with the Rate Limit Certificate. The approach is implemented using Opportunistic Network Environment Simulator which is a simulator particularly considered for evaluating routing and application protocols in Delay Tolerant Network.