Lifetime elongation of ad hoc networks under flooding attack using power-saving technique

Without the management of centralized unit, mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are vulnerable to security threats from flooding attacks launched through compromised nodes or intruders. When a source node needs a data session with a destination node, it disseminates a route request (RREQ) message to its neighbors in a hop-by-hop manner. One crucial type of flooding attacks called RREQ flooding appears to be inevitably proliferated in wireless networks. In the RREQ flooding attack, attackers would launch massive RREQ packets with out-of-domain IP address as its destination node. The forwarding services conducted by all intermediate nodes exhaust their energy and processing resources. The proposed approach can suppress redundant RREQ packets using the co-operation of destination node and neighbor nodes within one-hop range of the attacking node. A Petri Net design was developed to model the proposed approach and configure all relevant system aspects in a concise fashion for qualitative analysis. From quantitative viewpoint, relevant network simulations were conducted to validate the proposed scheme using a NS2 network simulator. The experimental result reveals that the proposed power-saving technique can be applied to economically and effectively elongate the operational lifetime of MANETs under flooding attack. 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.