The Efficient Prevention of Wormhole Attack in AODV Routing Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensors networks (WSNs) consist of a large number of tiny, spatially distributed, and autonomous devices, called sensor nodes. The latter are equipped with sensing, computation, and wireless communications capabilities, and have very limited resources. Wireless sensor networks have been widely used in remote areas, military scenarios, sensing motion applications, agriculture solutions and natural disaster hitted areas. Interest in the area of Wireless sensor networks is growing since last few years because of its practical applications. These networks are equipped with large number of sensors, which are spatially distributed. Wireless sensor networks are widely used in remote areas, defense and military scenarios. Hence, their security is critical issue. They are more vulnerable to attacks than wired networks. Wireless sensor networks suffer from various active and passive attacks. One of such type of attack is Wormhole attack. In this, pair of nodes creates a virtual tunnel in the network. The malicious node at one end, capture the packets and tunnel them to another malicious node. Wormhole is a severe attack which can affect the route discovery process of the network. In this paper, we propose a solution to the wormhole attack in one of the most prominent AODV (ad-hoc on demand distance vector) routing protocol. The proposed method works for the detection and prevention of the wormhole attack in sensor networks. In the proposed method, a sensor can detect the fake neighbors which are caused by wormhole through the neighbor discovery process, and then a Manhattan Distance algorithm is used to detect and prevent wormhole attack according to the neighbor information and the broadcasting nature for distinct and reliable communication. Manhattan algorithm makes the broadcasting and packet forwarding more reliable and secure and furthermore prevents the simulation from any malicious attack. The proposed method reduces the delay in the network to a considerable extent thereby enhancing the performance.