Detection and Prevention of Sinkhole Attack on AODV Protocol in Mobile Adhoc Network

MANET is formed by a collection of mobile nodes, with no preset infrastructure where each node plays a role of router, It is getting fame day by day due to wide use of mobile and handheld devices. Dynamic nature of this network, makes routing protocols to play a prominent role in setting up efficient route among pair of nodes. Therefore many proactive, reactive & hybrid routing protocols have been proposed, among which one of well known is AODV due to its high performance gain. Cooperative nature of nodes exposes MANET to various kinds of passive & active attacks. Sinkhole is one of severe kind of attack which attempts to attract most of network traffic towards it & degrade the performance of network. AODV is mainly analyzed under blakhole, wormhole & flooding attack, which needs to analyze under other kinds of attack also. This paper mainly focuses on sinkhole problem, its consequences & presents mechanism for detection & prevention of it on the context of AODV protocol. It also shows performance of AODV with no sinkhole attack, under attack & after applying our mechanism in the form of simulation result obtained for certain variation of nodes in network, by considering performance metrics as throughput, PDR, End to end delay & Packet loss. Simulation is carried out using widely used simulator NS2.