MRWDPP: Multipath Routing Wormhole Detection and Prevention Protocol in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a continuously self-configuring, infrastructureless network of mobile devices connected without wires. Ad hoc is Latin and means “for this” (i.e., for this purpose). The nodes also act as router. Routing is an important aspect of MANETs which is used to find the route which can be used for communication. Traditionally, routing protocols were focused on performance only. But security is also an important aspect. Due to limited bandwidth, limited storage capacity, dynamic topology, shared medium, open peer-to-peer communication, security in MANETs is difficult to implement compared to wired networks. There are number of attacks on routing protocols like routing table overflow attack, black hole attack, wormhole attack, route cache poisoning, sybill attack, modification, fabrication, location spoofing attacks, etc., which affect the functioning of MANETs and degrade the performance. So, there is need to secure routing protocols so that their functioning is not affected and performance is not degraded due to these attacks. A new way of detection and prevention of wormhole attack is proposed in this paper. Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) is converted into multipath routing protocol by changing the way intermediate node forwards the route request packet. The QualNet 5.0.2 simulator [1] is used to validate the proposed approach. Two new packets Dummy_Request and Dummy_Reply are introduced to check the vulnerability of the path. The format of these packets is same as route reply except the option type. The performance parameters used are packet delivery ratio and throughput. The results show that packet delivery ratio and throughput under wormhole attack is less compared to protocol without wormhole attack and theMultipath Routing Wormhole Detection and Prevention Protocol (MRWDPP) improves performance under wormhole attack.