NDTAODV: Neighbor Defense Technique for Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector(AODV) to mitigate flood attack in MANETS

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are collections of mobile nodes that can communicate with one another using multihop wireless links. MANETs are often deployed in the environments, where there is no fixed infrastructure and centralized management. The nodes of mobile ad hoc networks are susceptible to compromise. In such a scenario, designing an efficient, reliable and secure routing protocol has been a major challengesue over the last many years. The routing protocol Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) has no security measures in-built in it. It is vulnerable to many types of routing attacks. The flood attack is one of them. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective technique to secure Ad hoc Ondemand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol against flood attacks. To deal with a flood attack, we have proposed Neighbor Defense Technique for Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (NDTAODV). This makes AODV more robust. The proposed technique has been designed to isolate the flood attacker with the use of timers, peak value and hello alarm technique. We have simulated our work in Network Simulator NS-2.33 (NS-2) with different pause times by way of different number of malicious nodes. We have compared the performance of NDTAODV with the AODV in normal situation as well as in the presence of malicious attacks. We have considered Packet Delivery Fraction (PDF), Average Throughput (AT) and Normalized Routing Load (NRL) for comparing the performance of NDTAODV and AODV.