Impact of blackhole and wormhole attacks on DSDV Routing Protocol in VANET: behavioural analysis

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) play a crucial role in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and the advancement of intelligent vehicles, enabling seamless and reliable communication between vehicles and infrastructure. This communication supports real-time applications such as collision avoidance, traffic control, and driver assistance. However, due to their dynamic topology and open-access medium, VANETs are highly vulnerable to security threats, particularly blackhole and wormhole attacks, which can disrupt data routing and severely degrade network performance. Despite the growing importance of VANETs, there is a limited number of studies that specifically examine the impact of blackhole and wormhole attacks on the Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector (DSDV) routing protocol. This research addresses that gap by evaluating VANET performance under three conditions: no attack, a blackhole attack, and a wormhole attack. Key performance metrics including Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), throughput, End-to-End Delay (EED), and Routing Overhead (RO) are analysed across various node densities using NS-2.35 and SUMO 1.18.0. Notably, the results show a 76.9% decline in throughput under the wormhole attack compared to the baseline scenario, highlighting the significant performance degradation caused by such threats. Overall, this study provides valuable quantitative insights into the vulnerabilities of VANETs and underscores the urgent need for more secure and resilient routing protocols to defend against these emerging attacks.