DAWA: Defending against wormhole attack in MANETs by using fuzzy logic and artificial immune system

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are mobile networks, which are automatically outspread on a geographically limited region, without requiring any preexisting infrastructure. Mostly, nodes are both self-governed and self-organized without requiring a central monitoring. Because of their distributed characteristic, MANETs are vulnerable to a particular routing misbehavior, called wormhole attack. In wormhole attack, one attacker node tunnels packet from its position to the other attacker nodes. Such wormhole attack results in a fake route with fewer hop count. If source node selects this fictitious route, attacker nodes have the options of delivering the packets or dropping them. For this reason, this paper proposes an improvement over AODV routing protocol to design a wormhole-immune routing protocol. The proposed protocol called defending against wormhole attack (DAWA) employs fuzzy logic system and artificial immune system to defend against wormhole attacks. DAWA is evaluated through extensive simulations in the NS-2 environment. The results show that DAWA outperforms other existing solutions in terms of false negative ratio, false positive ratio, detection ratio, packet delivery ratio, packets loss ratio and packets drop ratio.