Performance and Security Analysis of ACO-AODV Protocol in Urban VANET Environments

Abstract

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) play a central role in the development of Intelligent
Transportation Systems (ITS) by enabling efficient communication between vehicles (V2V) and with
road infrastructure (V2I). Although they offer significant advantages in terms of security, traffic
management and mobility, their highly dynamic structure makes them vulnerable to attacks, especially
the Blackhole attack, which seriously compromises communications reliability.
In previous work, we proposed ACO-AODV, an enhanced version of the AODV protocol that
incorporates Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) principles. This bio-inspired mechanism improves route
selection by considering signal strength, latency, and available bandwidth.
In this study, we compare the performance of the ACO-AODV protocol under normal conditions with
that of the ACO-AODV-B protocol, exposed to a Blackhole attack.
Our objective is to evaluate the endurance of the ACO-based approach against malicious behavior by
analyzing key performance metrics such as packet delivery rate (PDR), average end-to-end delay and
normalized routing load.
Simulation results reveal a marked degradation in performance under attack, highlighting the limitations
of the current protocol and emphasizing the need for integrated detection and mitigation techniques to
strengthen VANET security.