An adaptive bio-inspired secure routing framework with ECC encryption and intrusion detection for MANET communication

This research addresses a critical gap in MANET security, where secure routing, trust management, energy efficiency, and IDS are often treated separately, leading to suboptimal performance under dynamic and adversarial conditions. Conventional cryptographic methods introduce high computational overhead, while trust- and learning-based approaches often overlook end-to-end security, adaptive routing, and receiver-side intrusion validation. To address these gaps, this paper proposes Sec-BIO, a unified secure routing framework that integrates bio-inspired optimization, lightweight cryptography, and machine-learning-based intrusion detection into a single adaptive architecture. EHO is embedded in the AODV routing procedure to create an intrusion-aware, energy-efficient routing framework that uses trust, residual energy, and congestion as routing metrics. DSA-based node authentication enables secure participation in the network, while ECC provides lightweight end-to-end data confidentiality. The receiver-side K-means clustering-based IDS also dynamically classifies traffic behaviour and updates node trust, enabling the system to mitigate real-time attacks and reconfigure routes as needed. To evaluate the framework, we tested it in NS2 across different node densities and mobility scenarios and compared it against AODV, E-AODV, S-AODV, EA-AODV, and traditional IDSs. The results show that Sec-BIO provides statistically significant improvements in the networking and security metrics. Compared with the baseline protocols, the proposed framework increases PDR by up to 15.20%, reduces E2E delay by 16.30%, reduces routing overhead by 9.20%, and reduces energy consumption by 18.23%. For IDS, the K-Means-based Sec-BIO framework achieves 96.70% precision, 97.44% recall, 96.08% accuracy, and 96.85% F1-score, whereas SVM, Random Forest, and Naïve Bayes classifiers perform worse. Overall, the results show that Sec-BIO improves routing efficiency, energy usage, and security under the examined MANET conditions, providing insights into its possible applications in dynamic and sensitive environments. However, further studies using wireless, realistic testbeds are needed for practical implementation.