Defending against Wormhole Attack in MANET Using an Artificial Immune System

MANETs are mobile networks that are spontaneously deployed over a geographically limited area without requiring any pre-existing infrastructure. Typically, nodes are both autonomous and self-organized without requiring a central administration or a fixed network infrastructure. Due to their distributed nature, MANET is vulnerable to a specific routing misbehavior, called wormhole attack. In a wormhole attack, one malicious node tunnels packets from its location to the other malicious node. Such wormhole attacks result in a false route with fewer hop count. If the source node follows this fake route, malicious nodes have the option of delivering the packets or dropping them. This article aims at removing these attacks. For this purpose, it investigates the use of an Artificial Immune System (AIS) to defend against wormhole attack. The proposed approach learns rapidly how to detect and bypass the wormhole nodes without affecting the overall performance of the network. The proposed approach is evaluated in comparison with other existing solutions in terms of dropped packet count, packet loss ratio, throughput, packet delivery ratio, and end-to-end delay. A simulation result shows that the proposed approach offers better performance than other schemes defending against the wormhole attack.