A Security Aware Fuzzy Enhanced ACO Routing Protocol in MANETs

Abstract

As Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) grow more popular and are deployed as solutions in various applications such as road safety in Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs), wildlife tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and Device-to-Device (D2D) communications in 5G, the need for efficient routing that is robust against malfunctioning or malicious network nodes is increasing. A fuzzy logic enhanced Ant Colony Optimization (ACO)-based routing algorithm, which addresses these issues, is proposed in this thesis. The Security Aware Fuzzy Enhanced Ant Colony Optimization (SAFEACO) routing protocol makes use of a distributed fuzzy logic module to identify misbehaving nodes and exclude them from the routing process. The SAFEACO routing protocol is implemented in the NS-3 simulator and various experiments have been performed in both MANET and VANET scenarios. The performance of SAFEACO is compared with other modern and widely known approaches. Simulation results show that SAFEACO has superior performance in all relevant metrics, such as packet delivery ratio (PDR) and end-to-end delay. Due to its ability to identify misbehaving nodes, SAFEACO also provides a higher level of robustness against black hole, Sybil and flooding attacks.