Robust Defense Scheme Against Selective Drop Attack in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Performance and security are two critical functions of wireless ad-hoc networks (WANETs). Network security ensures the integrity, availability, and performance of WANETs. It helps to prevent critical service interruptions and increases economic productivity by keeping networks functioning properly. Since there is no centralized network management in WANETs, these networks are susceptible to packet drop attacks. In selective drop attack, the neighboring nodes are not loyal in forwarding the messages to the next node. It is critical to identify the illegitimate node, which overloads the host node and isolating them from the network is also a complicated task. In this paper, we present a resistive to selective drop attack (RSDA) scheme to provide effective security against selective drop attack. A lightweight RSDA protocol is proposed for detecting malicious nodes in the network under a particular drop attack. The RSDA protocol can be integrated with the many existing routing protocols for WANETs such as AODV and DSR. It accomplishes reliability in routing by disabling the link with the highest weight and authenticate the nodes using the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm. In the proposed methodology, the packet drop rate, jitter, and routing overhead at a different pause time are reduced to 9%, 0.11%, and 45%, respectively. The packet drop rate at varying mobility speed in the presence of one gray hole and two gray hole nodes are obtained as 13% and 14% in RSDA scheme.