Enhancing Security in VANET Against Blackhole Attacks using AODV, K-Means Clustering, and PSO

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have emerged as a crucial type of ad hoc network, delivering efficient performance, safety, and seamless driving experience. Nonetheless, security risks remain as the information is exchanged among vehicle to vehicle (V2V), vehicle to infrastructure (V2I), and infrastructure to infrastructure (I2I), thereby allowing attackers to control the network. A black hole attack, for instance, can compromise the network, allowing a malicious node to inject false data, broadcast fake routing information, selectively drop packets, and completely disrupt the routing protocol. In this paper, a secure AODV routing protocol is implemented in combination with K-means clustering and Particle swarm optimization modified RREQ, RREP packets as a defense against the attack. This technique utilizes cryptography to encrypt and decrypt the vehicle packet sequence number, which validates the source and destination nodes. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated by the significant improvement in network performance metrics such as Throughput, Packet Delivery Ratio, End 2 End Delay, Black hole attack detection ratio, Packet Lost Rate, and Normalized Routing Load.