Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

Computers, Materials and Continua

Publication Date

1-1-2024

Abstract

Enhancing the security of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) improves the usability of their applications. Therefore, finding solutions to various attacks, such as the blackhole attack, is crucial for the success of WSN applications. This paper proposes an enhanced version of the AODV (Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector) protocol capable of detecting blackholes and malfunctioning benign nodes in WSNs, thereby avoiding them when delivering packets. The proposed version employs a network-based reputation system to select the best and most secure path to a destination. To achieve this goal, the proposed version utilizes the Watchdogs/Pathrater mechanisms in AODV to gather and broadcast reputations to all network nodes to build the network-based reputation system. To minimize the network overhead of the proposed approach, the paper uses reputation aggregator nodes only for forwarding reputation tables. Moreover, to reduce the overhead of updating reputation tables, the paper proposes three mechanisms, which are the prompt broadcast, the regular broadcast, and the light broadcast approaches. The proposed enhanced version has been designed to perform effectively in dynamic environments such as mobile WSNs where nodes, including blackholes, move continuously, which is considered a challenge for other protocols. Using the proposed enhanced protocol, a node evaluates the security of different routes to a destination and can select the most secure routing path. The paper provides an algorithm that explains the proposed protocol in detail and demonstrates a case study that shows the operations of calculating and updating reputation values when nodes move across different zones. Furthermore, the paper discusses the proposed approach’s overhead analysis to prove the proposed enhancement’s correctness and applicability.

ISSN

1546-2218

Publisher

Tech Science Press

Volume

80

Issue

2

First Page

1867

Last Page

1888

Disciplines

Computer Sciences

Keywords

AODV, blackhole, malfunction nodes, pathrater, reputation system, watchdogs, wireless sensor networks (WSNs)

Scopus ID

85201287779

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

yes

Open Access Type

Gold: This publication is openly available in an open access journal/series

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