Route Inference Based Sinkhole Attack Detection System f or Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a highly popular wireless network technology due to the proliferation of wireless devices. The characteristic of mobile ad hoc network is described as wireless links and open medium, centralized decision making, dynamic topology, limited power supply, bandwidth constraint and no predefined boundary. Due to its unique characteristics, this technology has been used to support communications in situations where it may be impossible to deploy infrastructure networks, such as military battlefields, disaster recovery sites and medical emergency situations. However, they appear to be susceptible to a variety of attacks than any other networks. The nodes of a MANET communicate with each other with the help of intermediate nodes. Each node of a network act as a host as well as a router. Efficient routing protocols have been developed to support the functionality of each node. These protocols trust that all the nodes are cooperative and well behaved. But some nodes act as a malicious node and launch various attacks on routing protocols. Mainly sinkhole attack affects the routing functionality of the network. Therefore, route inference-based attack detection has been proposed to handle the sinkhole attack in the networks. The proposed system computes the weight value by considering route factor, flow factor and sink factor. Based on the weight value, a malicious node is identified. The experiment results indicate that, the proposed system achieved a packet delivery ratio of 99.6% and throughput of 2700 kbps.