BeeAIS: Artificial immune system security for nature inspired, MANET routing protocol, BeeAdHoc

Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) offer a relatively novel and promising paradigm to solve the problem of security in Mobile Adhoc Networks (MANETs). In this paper we address the issue of security in the challenging MANET environment by developing an AIS based security framework to detect misbehavior in a Bio/Nature inspired MANET routing protocol, BeeAdHoc. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to provide AIS based protection in the Bio/Nature inspired domain of MANET routing. We designed and developed a security framework, BeeAIS, in the network simulator ns-2. We simulated a number of routing attacks to verify that the AIS based security system can counter all of them. These attacks, however, were successful in a MANET running the original BeeAdHoc protocol. We also compared our AIS based system with a cryptographic security system, BeeSec, developed earlier for BeeAdHoc. The results of our extensive experiments clearly indicate the effectiveness of the AIS to provide a similar security level as that of the cryptographic solution, but at significantly lower energy and communication cost. The efficient utilization of constrained bandwidth and battery is a key requirement in MANET routing.