Improved ITCA Method to Mitigate Network-Layer Attack in MANET

MANET is well known for its inherent feature of on-demand ad hoc establishment of network. This makes MANET a suitable option for many applications like Disaster management, military applications, etc. But the mutual dependency among the nodes make the MANET vulnerable for many attacks. Researchers had proposed many solutions to make the routing in MANET secure, ITCA is one of the proposed examples which tries to identify malicious activity and isolate infected nodes from network through multiple dimensions. The Improved ITCA proposed in this paper tries to make attack detection system real time and trust calculation adaptive to the application-specific parameters. This will reduce the burden over source node, which has been used by most of ACK-based solution for attack identification and isolation, in turn tries to reduce the number of control packet required that optimize the overhead and make the attack detection and isolation process more simple and faster. The Improved ITCA introduces a lightweight real-time option for secured ACK-based approach, whereas adaptive application-specific trust calculation parameters make the system more robust or work efficiently even when percentage of malicious node in the network is high.