A Mobility and Energy-Aware Hierarchical Intrusion Detection System for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

This paper presents a hierarchical cluster-based IDS architecture for Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs) that considers the mobility and energy of nodes in the cluster formation in order to improve detection accuracy and reduce energy consumption. The proposed architecture adopts and enhances the Mobility and Energy Aware Clustering Algorithm (MEACA), which is the most appropriate for IDS in MANETs, since it aims at forming mobility aware and energy efficient 1-hop clusters. The algorithm maximizes the clusters’ stability by choosing nodes with relatively low mobility and high energy to be the cluster-heads and keeping the constructed clusters unchanged to the extent of their maximum possible lifetime. The key advantage of the proposed IDS is that its detection accuracy is not affected from nodes mobility, since each cluster includes nodes with similar direction and speed. Thus, mobile nodes of the same cluster appear more static to each other eliminating cluster reformation, which negatively affects the detection accuracy. Moreover, the distribution of the detection load is based on the remaining energy in each node. Thus, nodes with adequate energy undertake more detection responsibilities than nodes with low power. In this way, the proposed IDS balances the energy consumption in a fair and efficient manner.