DTAM: A Dynamic Threshold and Monitoring Based Technique to Protect Mobile Ad-hoc Network from Black-Hole and Flooding Attacks

Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is an emerging and prevalent technology in wireless networks that consists of autonomous mobile nodes. These movable nodes can easily join and exit the network. Mobile nodes communicate with other nodes via intermediary nodes, eliminating the need for any fixed infrastructure. In this network, it is expected that intermediate nodes always assist in locating the destination node by rebroadcasting the request packet provided by the source node if the destination is not found in the routing table. However, in a real-world network, there may be some dishonest nodes that do not assist in identifying the best path for the destinations and instead deliver a fake route reply regarding the shortest path for destination nodes with the highest destination sequence number. The liar node's bogus route reply packet draws data traffic, resulting in packet loss in the network. This sort of malicious behavior on this network is sometimes referred to as a black-hole attack, which is an active attack that degrades network performance. A flooding attack is a form of denial-of-service attack that uses network bandwidth by flooding the flooder node with bogus packets. In a route request flooding attack, the flooder node uses a large number of false request packets to drain network resources. This work presents a Dynamic Threshold And Monitoring-based (DTAM) technique for protecting MANETs from black-hole and flooding attack. The NS-2 simulator is used to evaluate the performance of various protocols, and the findings reveal that the DTAM scheme outperforms the existing state-of-the-art schemes on various performance metrics.