Prevention of sleep deprivation attacks using clustering

MANETs are highly vulnerable to attacks due to the open medium dynamically changing network topology, cooperative algorithm, lack of centralized monitoring and management point. The fact that security is a critical problem in implementing mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is widely acknowledged. One of the different kinds of misbehavior a node may exhibit is exhausting a node by consuming its battery power. Routing protocol plays a crucial role for effective communication between mobile nodes and operates on the basic assumption that nodes are fully cooperative. Because of open structure and limited battery-based energy some nodes may not cooperate correctly. In this paper an algorithm is proposed to prevent sleep deprivation attack. The proposed algorithm is based on clustering mechanism.