Evaluation of Routing Protocols and Security Issues for MANET

Abstract

In this era of wireless devices, Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) has become an indivisible part for communication for mobile devices. This Paper presents a coherent survey on MANET – Mobile Ad Hoc Network, with the intent of serving as a quick reference to the current research in ad hoc networking. It starts with a background on the origin and deployment constraints of ad hoc network fully distinguishing it from traditional network. This paper discusses a broad range of research issue such as Routing Protocols and Security issues.

 Ad hoc networks are characterized by multi-hop wireless connectivity, frequently changing network topology and the need for efficient dynamic routing protocols plays an important role. In this paper we compare the performance of three on-demand routing Protocols for mobile Ad-hoc network (MANET) networks: Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Ad Hoc On-demand distance Vector Routing (AODV) and Temporarily Ordered Routing Algorithm (TORA) in by varying the size of the networks. The performance metrics selected to make the performance differences are Total Traffic Received, Traffic Load, Throughput, Number of Hops per Route and Route Discovery Time. AODV shows a Considerable better performance over the others for any number of nodes. TORA and DSR show moderate performance for minimum number of nodes, where in the case of large networks, DSR shows some performance rather than TORA.

Parallely it provides an overview of routing protocols by presenting their characteristics, functionality, benefits and limitations and then makes their comparative analysis so to analyze their performance. The wireless links in ad hoc network are highly error prone as it is collection of multi-hop wireless mobile nodes that communicate with each other without centralized control or established infrastructure, so it can go down frequently due to mobility of nodes, interference and less infrastructure. Therefore, routing in MANET is a critical task due to highly dynamic environment. In recent years, several routing protocols have been proposed for mobile ad hoc networks and prominent among them are DSR, AODV,DSDV and TORA. However the AODV and DSDV are perform very well when mobility is high. Security is a big issue in MANETs as they are infrastructure-less and autonomous. This paper will address some basic security concerns in MANET.

 This paper would be a great help for the people conducting research on real world problems in MANET routing protocols as well as its security.