RREQ flood attack and its mitigation in ad hoc network

Abstract

RREQ Flood Attack is one of the prominent attack in Wireless Adhoc Network. In the flood attack, a malicious node fills up all the routing tables with its own packets and hence communication between source and destination becomes paralyzed. To secure against flooding attack, a mitigation scheme is proposed which uses Time to Live value to mark and remove the malicious node that floods the network. In the proposed scheme, RREQ limit is set which is dynamically checked after certain period so that the flood attack does not occur. The Simulation of the proposed scheme is done by Qualnet and the result shows that the scheme prevents the flooding attack, reduces the end-to-end delay and increases the throughput.