Abstract
A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is an open wireless network of mobile, decentralized, and self-organized nodes with limited energy and bandwidth resources. The MANET environment is vulnerable to dangerous attacks, such as flooding-based attacks, which paralyze the functionality of the whole network. This paper introduces a hybrid intelligent algorithm, which can meet the challenge of protecting MANET with effective security and network performance. This objective is fulfilled by inspiring the abstract anomaly detection of dendritic cells (DCs) in the human immune system and the accurate decision-making functionality of fuzzy logic theory to introduce a dendritic Cell Fuzzy Algorithm (DCFA). DCFA combines the relevant features of danger theory-based AISs and fuzzy logic theory-based systems. DCFA is verified using QualNet v5.0.2 to detect resource consumption attack. The results show the efficient capability of DCFA to perform the detection operation with high network and security performance.