A cluster-based countermeasure against blackhole attacks in MANETs

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) become more and more popular and significant in many fields. However, the important applications of MANETs make them very attractive to attackers. The deployment scenarios, the functionality requirements, and the limited capabilities of these types of networks make them vulnerable to a large group of attacks, e.g., blackhole attacks. In this paper, we propose a cluster-based scheme for the purpose of preventing blackhole attacks in MANETs. In our scheme, we firstly present a novel algorithm that employs a powerful analytic hierarchy process (AHP) methodology to elect clusterheads (CHs). Then CHs are required to implement the blackhole attacks prevention scheme to not only detect the existence of blackhole attacks but also identify the blackhole nodes. Simulation results show that our scheme is feasible and efficient in preventing blackhole attacks.