A novel node collusion method for isolating sinkhole nodes in mobile ad hoc cloud

Abstract

Cloud computing combined with mobile technology provides immense computing capabilities. The services and applications can be accessed anywhere and anytime. The required services for mobile users are offered on runtime with high reliability and availability by the mobile ad hoc cloud. Mobile devices communicate with each other through multi-hop communication using routing protocols. Heterogeneity of the devices, limited battery life, and mobility of the nodes are the salient features of the mobile devices. These characteristics impose greater challenges in terms of routing, security, and privacy. Any attacker node can advertise false routing information to lure other nodes to use its service. Such nodes are called sinkhole nodes. Sinkhole nodes need to be isolated from the mobile cloud as early as possible with high precision to provide uninterrupted service to other mobile users. This paper proposes a node collusion method for the detection and isolation of sinkhole nodes. The proposed method has been implemented using NS-2 simulator. The results were obtained. The results were compared with the existing state-of-the-art algorithms for sinkhole detection. It is found that the proposed method outperforms other methods in terms of detection time, false-positive ratio, routing overhead, and packet delivery ratio.