An Efficient Approach for Detecting Wormhole Attacks in AODV Routing Protocol

In MANET, wormhole link creates an illusion in such a way that two remote regions are directly connected through nodes which seems to be neighbors; however, these are actually distant from one another. The attackers using wormhole can easily manipulate the routing priority in AODV to perform eavesdropping, packet modification, or packet drop. Hence, a two-phase wormhole link detection procedure in AODV routing protocol is proposed to identify the malicious link for avoiding such erroneous transmission. Initially, the round trip time (RTT) and corresponding round trip bit transfer (RTBT) of each link are determined. Here, if RTBT of any link is greater than a dynamic threshold value (RTBTTH), then such victim link is marked as a suspicious link. Next, the amount of power required to send a packet of certain size by each node is obtained to verify whether the transmission power of suspected links is reasonably high compared to other links. Various experimental results are carried out to validate the proposed work as well as to show an improvement obtained by the proposed approach in terms of several performance metrics.