Ensemble PSOF Approach for Mitigating Gray Hole Attacks in VANETs using Swarm Intelligence and Firefly Algorithm

Abstract

As Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks(VANETs) play a vital role in intelligent transportation systems, they are also susceptible to many attacks and unfortunately gray hole attack is one amongst them. In this paper, a new method based on hybridization of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Firefly Algorithm for detecting gray hole attack in VANETs is proposed which we call PSOF. The hybrid protocol uses the optimization features of PSO and attraction mechanism of Firefly Algorithm to enhance route discovery along with malicious node detection. Numerical results utilizing Omnet++ simulation demonstrated that PSOF improves PDR, reduces packet loss and also diminishes E-E delay. This demonstrates to be a computationally efficient and scalable alternative compared with other cryptographic techniques as well machine learning based approaches.