An Empirical Study of Routing Attacks in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Abstract

Mobile ad-hoc network is an infrastructure-less and self-organizing network, where nodes communicate through wireless links. Because of its dynamic topology, security becomes a vital issue compared to infrastructure networks. MANETs are more vulnerable to various types of security attacks due to the absence of trusted centralized authority. Several routing protocols have been proposed for these networks to establish an end to end link for communication between the nodes. These protocols are prone to attacks by the malicious nodes and there is always a need to detect and prevent the attacks timely before the collapse of network. In this paper the focus lies on current routing attacks, security issues of ad-hoc networks and solutions to mitigate attacks against the routing protocols based on cooperation between nodes in network.