WARP: A wormhole-avoidance routing protocol by anomaly detection in mobile ad hoc networks

The infrastructure of a Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) has no routers for routing, and all nodes must share the same routing protocol to assist each other when transmitting messages. However, almost all common routing protocols at present consider performance as first priority, and have little defense capability against the malicious nodes. Many researches have proposed various protocols of higher safety to defend against attacks; however, each has specific defense objects, and is unable to defend against particular attacks. Of all the types of attacks, the wormhole attack poses the greatest threat and is very difficult to prevent; therefore, this paper focuses on the wormhole attack, and proposes a secure routing protocol based on the AODV (Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector) routing protocol, which is named WARP (Wormhole-Avoidance Routing Protocol). WARP considers link-disjoint multipaths during path discovery, and provides greater path selections to avoid malicious nodes, but eventually uses only one path to transmit data. Based on the characteristic that wormhole nodes can easily grab the route from the source node to the destination node, WARP enables the neighbors of the wormhole nodes to discover that the wormhole nodes have abnormal path attractions. Then, the wormhole nodes would be gradually isolated by their normal neighboring nodes, and finally be quarantined by the whole network.