Performance comparison of multipath reactive Ad hoc routing protocols

The recent proliferation of wireless devices extends the scope of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) applications beyond the military domain to include civil and commercial application scenarios. Since MANETs are composed of mobile terminals with limited resources, guaranteeing their security remains an unsolved and motivating challenge. Due to advantageous features like infrastructureless and spontaneous deployment, MANETs offer an opportunity to set up temporary, dynamic and local networks for low cost. However, some of their characteristics like unreliability of wireless links, dynamic topology, and absence of underlying infrastructure raise serious problems which become critical when security is also considered. Multipath routing scheme enhances the robustness of routing protocols and offers a mean to mitigate networks mobility impact and node misbehaviors. In this paper we compare the performances of five multipath routing protocols: three node-disjoint multipath routing protocols and two routing protocols based on a Untrusted Node Disjoint (UND) path scheme. Comparisons between these protocols highlight the improvements raised by the UND scheme under different attack configurations.