Analysis of a defenseless ad hoc on demand Distance Vector routing protocol under routing disruption attacks

Ad hoc networks are formed with the help of their constituent wireless mobile nodes which are expected to forward packets for other nodes in a cooperative manner. Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector routing; AODV is one of such protocols that helps to create and maintain routes in spite of the dynamic network topology. This protocol is vulnerable to a number of security threats that come from internal malicious nodes which have authorization credentials to participate in the network. Malicious nodes can deliberately disrupt the correct operation of the routing protocol. This paper evaluates performance of a defenseless AODV when a number of network´s nodes misbehave. Various routing disruption attack´s scenarios are simulated using ns-2. The performance impact on the defenseless AODV is evaluated and compared to the performance of the regular AODV. The simulation results indicate that the presence of malicious nodes is a significant problem to the defenseless AODV protocol.