Enhanced OLSR for defense against DOS attack in ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) refers to a network designed for special applications for which it is difficult to use a backbone network. In MANETs, applications are mostly involved with sensitive and secret information. Since MANET assumes a trusted environment for routing, security is a major issue. In this paper we analyze the vulnerabilities of a pro-active routing protocol called optimized link state routing (OLSR) against a specific type of denial-of-service (DOS) attack called node isolation attack. Analyzing the attack, we propose a mechanism called enhanced OLSR (EOLSR) protocol which is a trust based technique to secure the OLSR nodes against the attack. Our technique is capable of finding whether a node is advertising correct topology information or not by verifying its Hello packets, thus detecting node isolation attacks. The experiment results show that our protocol is able to achieve routing security with 45% increase in packet delivery ratio and 44% reduction in packet loss rate when compared to standard OLSR under node isolation attack. Our technique is light weight because it doesn't involve high computational complexity for securing the network.