An Efficient Performance and Security in Mobile Ad Hoc Wireless Sensor Networks

A Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork (MANET) is an autonomous collection of mobile users that communicate over relatively bandwidth constrained wireless links. One of the main issues in such networks is performance-in a dynamically changing topology; the nodes are expected to be power-aware due to the bandwidth constrained network. Another issue in such networks is security-since every node participates in the operation of the network equally, malicious nodes are difficult to detect. There are several applications of mobile ad hoc networks such as disaster recovery operations, battle field communications, etc. To study these issues, a scenario based simulation analysis of a secure routing protocol is done and is compared with traditional non-secure routing protocols. The scenarios used for the experiments depict critical real-world applications such as battlefield and rescue operations, which tend to have contradicting needs. An analysis of the tradeoffs between performance and security is done to gain an insight into the applicability of the routing protocols under consideration.