Route information poisoning in MANETs: A simulative study

Ad hoc networks are known to be deployed on an emergent basis and could help recover in emergency situations where the fixed infrastructure is infeasible. Due to no infrastructure, each node relies on the cooperation of another node. Route discovery and packet forwarding is done by all nodes with the help of other participating nodes. Acquiring a legitimate route may become difficult in the presence of malicious nodes that proactively work to deceive the non-malicious nodes. A malicious node could provide false information during route discovery that would increase the legitimate route acquisition time and results in extensive data packet loss. Such concept is known as route information poisoning and would affect the route requesting as well as intermediate nodes. Famous routing protocols i.e. DSR and AODV are inherently vulnerable to malicious behaviors and do not provide any detection or prevention mechanism. This paper discusses the simulation based analysis of MANETs that were configured to use DSR and AODV routing protocols in the presence of malicious nodes, which were conducting two kinds of route information poisoning attack i.e. fabricated RREP and RERR. These attacks decreased overall packet delivery ratio and caused an enormous increase in routing packets to acquire legitimate routes. Among both attacks, fabricated RERR attack caused decline in overall network performance. This study could be a helpful resource for the researchers who are engaged to propose detection or prevention techniques against route information poisoning in MANETs.