Defending against jellyfish attacks using cluster based routing protocol for secured data transmission in MANET

In MANETs, secured communication is considered as a key application. There have been many attempts reported in literature for enhancing security in MANETs. The way of preventing several attacks have been employed so far among which adverting collaborative attacks has become the serious challenge. The nodes which launch collaborative attacks have been detected and eliminated using Collaborative Bait Detection Scheme (CBDS). However, CBDS has failed to enhance the security against the jellyfish attacks which subsequently affect the routing protocol due to poor packet transmission caused by malicious nodes. The present work describes the improved approach for secured transmission by introducing ant colony optimization based clustered based routing protocol (ACO-CBRP). In this method, the clustering of nodes is done using proposed ACO based approach in which the node’s trust value determines routing performance. The nodes having the appropriate trust values enable the calculation of the trust tables of the MANET for detecting the jellyfish attacks. During the process of data transmission, enhanced security can be assured by means of secured key management. The performance evaluation of the present approach is done based on different metrics such as lifetime, overhead and packet delivery ratio using NS-2 simulator platform. The obtained result implies the better performance of the proposed ACO-CBRP approach in mitigating jellyfish attacks.