Mobile ad hoc networks will appear in environments where the nodes of the networks are absent and have little or no physical protection against tampering. The wireless nodes of MANET are thus susceptible to compromise and are particularly vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks launched by malicious nodes or intruders. Flooding attack is one such type of DoS attack, in which a compromised node floods the entire network by sending a large number of fake RREQs to nonexistent nodes in the network, thus resulting in network congestion. In this paper, the security of MANET AODV routing protocol is investigated by identifying the impact of flooding attack on it. A simulation study of the effects of flooding attack on the performance of the AODV routing protocol is presented using random waypoint mobility model The simulation environment is implemented by using the NS-3 network simulator. It is observed that due to the presence of such malicious nodes, average percentage of packet loss in the network, average routing overhead and average bandwidth requirement− all increases, thus degrading the performance of MANET significantly.
AODV, flooding attack, malicious nodes, MANET, NS-3 simulation, packet loss, wireless security
