Enhancing MANET Security: A Watch Dog Routing Algorithm Approach for Intruder and Black Hole Attack Detection

When wireless nodes communicate without the use of infrastructure, the network is subject to security breaches. Mobile Adhoc Network (MANET) is one of the most vulnerable wireless networks in terms of security breaches. The most common types of security breaches are intruders and attackers, whose tasks are to reduce the internal performance of the network. Many research studies are focused on detecting and preventing these two security threads. This article focuses on intruder and black hole attackers and their communication. Several techniques were proposed for thwart the intruders and attackers in the Mobile Adhoc Network communication by using the modern technologies which are an additional load to the nodes operation and these techniques could not be able to predict the attacker before it was done. To achieve this goal, this article proposed the Watch Dog approach involves routing protocol to monitoring the forwarding time of all nodes in the transmission. Delays in forwarded time nodes could indicate an intruder, while discarding the forwarded node could indicate a black hole attacker. The proposed Watch Dog routing algorithm with classification technique was implemented with a network simulator with Adhoc On Demand Vector protocol named as WD-AODV, and the simulation results were compared to a modern techniques of Fuzzy Logic based AODV (FL-AODV), Machine Learning-based AODV (ML-AODV) and Artificial Intelligence based AODV (AI-AODV) routing protocol. The compared results of attack rates, attack detection time, Packet delivery ratio and End to End delay showed that the Watch Dog-based attacker and intruder detection methods perform better by more than 59%, with excellent performance factors of 69%.