Security and performance enhancement of AODV routing protocol

International audienceA mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) is a decentralized, self-organizing, infrastructure-less network andadaptive gathering of independent mobile nodes. Because of the unique characteristics of MANET, themajor issues to develop a routing protocol in MANET are the security aspect and the network performance.In this paper, we propose a new secure protocol called Trust Ad Hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV)using trust mechanism. Communication packets are only sent to the trusted neighbor nodes. Trust calculationis based on the behaviors and activities information of each node. It is divided in to trust global (TG)and trust local (TL). TG is a trust calculation based on the total of received routing packets and the totalof sending routing packets. TL is a comparison between total received packets and total forwarded packetsby neighbor node from specific nodes. Nodes conclude the total trust level of its neighbors by accumulatingthe TL and TG values. The performance of Trust AODV is evaluated under denial of service/distributeddenial of service (DOS/DDOS) attack using network simulator NS-2. It is compared with the Trust CrossLayer Secure (TCLS) protocol. Simulation results show that the Trust AODV has a better performance thanTCLS protocol in terms of end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio, and overhead. Next, we improve theperformance of Trust AODV using ant algorithm. The proposed protocol is called Trust AODV+ Ant.The implementation of ant algorithm in the proposed secure protocol is by adding an ant agent to put thepositive pheromone in the node if the node is trusted. Ant agent is represented as a routing packet. Thepheromone value is saved in the routing table of the node. We modified the original routing table by addingthe pheromone value field. The path communication is selected based on the pheromone concentration andthe shortest path. Trust AODV+ Ant is compared with simple ant routing algorithm (SARA), AODV, andTrust AODV under DOS/DDOS attacks in terms of performance. Simulation results show that the packetdelivery ratio and throughput of the Trust AODV increase after using ant algorithm. However, in termsof end-to-end delay, there is no significant improvement