Effect of Security Breaches in the Behaviour of Reactive Routing Protocols for Manets

Abstract

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are self-organized, self-configuring collection of autonomous mobile nodes that temporarily forms network and does not require any infrastructure or centralized administration for data communication. These mobile nodes use unguided transmission medium (wireless medium) thereby giving them freedom of mobility across the network. MANETs being low cost networks with ease of deployment has made it popular in wide application areas viz military application, commercial application, traffic management, disaster management to name a few. Since MANETs does not require any centralized administration, the routing protocols heavily rely on the cooperation of all participant nodes in the network. Though the characteristics of MANETs simplicity, ease of deployment and non-existence of centralized infrastructure or administration are found attractive, the network is vulnerable to threats from malicious nodes which can lead to disruption of the network. The routing protocols available for MANETs also does not provide any mechanism to counter threats or identify malicious nodes or behavior in the network. newlineWhile MANETs are of great advantage for establishment of fly-in network, malicious nodes pose as great threat on the overall performance of the network and its associated application. In this context, this research is aimed to find and evaluate the performance of routing protocols when exposed to threats / maliciousness. newlineThough MANETs in general, are extremely vulnerable to different types of attacks across all layers of protocol stack, the network layer security issues draw special attention due to the cooperative routing protocols being followed in such networks thus giving ample opportunity to the attackers to exploit the network layer and disturb or even bring down the network operation. Though there are various types of attacks that are possible to becarried out at the network layer, few amongst them are found to be lethal and cause great damage to the network. newline