Performance Evaluation of a Secured Ad-hoc Routing Protocol

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to find out how security affects the performance of an ad-hoc routing protocol. To study the impacts, an existing ad-hoc routing protocol AODV has been chosen and its performance is evaluated under different network scenarios. Various attack scenarios which can affect the performance were simulated and secure measures were deployed to handle such attacks. The primary objective is to find out how the routing overhead and other performance metrics were affected when additional security is added to AODV. Four different versions of the AODV protocol were simulated namely, the normal AODV routing protocol, AODV with malicious nodes, secure AODV with no malicious nodes and secure AODV with malicious nodes. These four protocols were tested on different network scenarios and their performance was evaluated. The simulations were performed using the network simulator ns-2 by varying the node population, pause times and speed of the node movement in a rectangular field of 1500m x 500m. Performance metrics such as packet delivery ratio, average end-end delay and normalized routing overhead were measured along with the routing overhead for all the routing protocols. The AODV protocol performed best in the absence of malicious nodes. In the absence of malicious nodes secure AODV's performance is slightly better than secure AODV with malicious nodes. However, in the presence of malicious nodes, AODV has the worst performance compared to all the other three protocols. In other words, SAODV performs best when the network is under attack. The simulations also proved that if the node population increases then the performance of the protocols is improved due to the participation of more nodes in the routing.