Performance Evaluation of Secure On-Demand Routing Protocols for Mobile Adhoc Networks

Abstract

With the passage of time and increase in the need for mobility, wireless or mobile networks emerged to replace the wired networks. This new generation of networks is different from the earlier one in many aspects like network infrastructure, bandwidth and processing resources, routing protocols, routing devices etc. These networks have limited bandwidth and processing power with no network infrastructure or dedicated routing devices. Moreover, every node in such networks has to take care of its routing module itself i.e. Route Discovery, Route Maintenance etc. These characteristics motivate the attackers to launch DoS attacks in mobile ad-hoc networks thereby increasing the importance of security in such networks. Therefore, we have to compare the available protocols so that the decision for the choice of a secure routing protocol is easier. As the importance of evaluation is very clear, work has been done to compare different protocols on basis of security. But keeping in view the resource limitations in such networks, evaluation based on performance metrics is also important.

In this project we evaluate the overall performance overhead associated with secure routing protocols for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) and the effect of this overhead on the overall communication of the network. To achieve our goals, we implement the Secure Ad-hoc on-Demand Distance Vector routing protocol (SAODV) extensions with AODV [1] in the Network Simulator 2 (NS-2) and use the Monarch Project [2] implementation of Ariadne for our evaluation purpose. We try to figure out the amount of extra work a mobile node has to do in order to communicate securely.