Performance Analysis of Hybrid Protocol Under Distributed Denial of Service Attack in Remote Healthcare Systems

Introduction: The future of healthcare systems relies on faster communication between sensors and smart devices, which can assist in making decisions for the betterment of patients. The responsiveness of the wireless health care system in case of medical urgencies is a crucial factor for the survival of patient’s life. The routing protocol of infrastructure-less based plays a key role in sending the information in such medical related emergencies. Therefore, it is important to study and identify the best routing protocol in wireless healthcare based system using Mobile Ad-hoc networks (MANETS). Methods: MANET routing protocols such as Ad-hoc On-Demand Vector (AODV), Secure AODV (SAODV) and Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP) through their routing environment are simulated through this research study. It is essential to highlight the effect of various attacks affecting the routing methodology of these protocols. Since the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is popularly talked about and is the most vulnerable attack present in the MANET environment, therefore this research study analyses AODV, SAODV and HWMP under DDoS attack through various simulation parameters. Results: In this research study, most suitable routing protocols to handle DDoS attacks are simulated and estimated in terms of delay and packet delivery ratio in the scenario of changing nodes. This aids in providing implications to enhance existing protocols and alleviate the consequences of DDoS investigation by such attacks. Discussion: For ensuring the optimized routing, privacy and security of patient’s data during transmission in the healthcare sector, MANET could be used as one of the important technology combined with IoT. For dealing with end to end data transmission of patient's sensitive data, MANET protocol plays a vital role in sending the information securely. Conclusion: The performance of AODV, SAODV and HWMP (Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol) are compared and tabularized, which are the most popularly utilized protocols in the healthcare environment. The simulation results show that the HWMP outperformed AODV and SAODV routing protocol in terms of evaluation metrics, namely end-to-end delay and Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), and could be considered as much less vulnerable against DDoS attacks prevailing in the wireless healthcare sector using MANET. © 2022 Bentham Science Publishers.