Global Sci-Tech

Recently laptop computers have replaced desktops with all respect as they continue to show improvements in convenience, mobility, capacity and availability of disk storage. Now small computers can be equipped with storage capacity of Gigabytes, high resolution color display, pointing devices and wireless communication adapters. Since, these small computer can be operated with the power of battery, the user are free to move as per their convenience without bothering about constraints with respect to wired devices. In a wireless ad hoc network, the devices communicate with each other using a wireless physical medium without relying on pre-existing wired infrastructure. That's why ad hoc network is also known as infrastructure less network. These networks are also known as mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), can form stand-alone groups of wireless terminals, but some of these may be connected to some fixed network. A very fundamental characteristic of ad hoc networks is that they are able to configure themselves on-the-fly without intervention of a centralized administration. 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. A Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of mobile devices that are dynamic in nature which can communicate with each other without any help of a pre installed infrastructure, access point or centralized administration. One of the major challenges in a MANET, is to design the robust routing algorithms. Mobile ad hoc networks pose various kinds of security problems, caused by their nature of collaborative and open systems and by limited availability of resources. I have focused on few of the major routing protocols of MANET and their security issues.