Behavioural Study of Reactive Protocols with Wormhole Attack in Mobile ADHOC Networks

A temporary collection of wireless mobile nodes in decentralized manner is known as Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET). In a hostile environment of MANET, security is the primary concern to achieve protected communication between mobile nodes. A number of nontrivial challenges to security designs mandate the demand of building multi-fence security solutions that achieve both extended protection and adorable network performance.MANET’s are vulnerable to many security attacks because of shared channel, insecure operating environment, lack of central authority, limited resource availability, dynamically changing network topology and resource constraints. Wormhole attack, black hole attack and grayhole attack are different network layer attacks and wormhole is the dominant attack of all. In this work, wormhole attack is implemented in Qualnet 4.5 with three different modes i.e., all pass, all drop and threshold mode with varying the network size comprising of 15, 20, 25, 30 and 35 nodes. Performance of four reactive protocols i.e., AODV, DSR, DYMO and ANODR is analyzed in the presence of wormhole attack with four parameters, i.e., throughput, average end-to-end delay, average jitter and packet delivery ratio in mobility and non-mobility domain. Simulations revealed that AODV protocol is more vulnerable to wormhole attack in mobility domain which results into low packet delivery ratio (PDR) of AODV protocol in mobility domain. DSR protocol is least vulnerable to wormhole attack in non-mobility domain. DSR protocol experiences high PDR in non-mobility mode due to pre specified route in route cache which does not changes due to non-mobility. DYMO and ANODR protocol experiences constant throughput in non-mobility domain and shows variations in throughput for mobility domain.