Performance of secured zone routing protocol due to the effect of malicious nodes in MANETs

Ad hoc networks are wireless networks without a fixed infrastructure, which are usually assembled on a temporary basis to serve a specific deployment such as emergency rescue or battlefield communication. Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) is one of the hybrid routing protocols in MANETs, which is vulnerable to a number of security threats that come from internal malicious nodes which have authorization credentials to participate in the network. Malicious nodes deliberately drop routing and data packets and disrupt the correct operation of the routing protocol. To overcome this problem, we proposed Secured ZRP (SZRP) based on efficient key management, secure neighbor discovery, secure routing packets, detection of malicious nodes, and preventing these nodes from destroying the network. We proposed a new technique to deal with malicious nodes, and prevent them from further destroying the network. We demonstrate the performance of SZRP using NS2 Simulator. Furthermore, we compared the performance of SZRP and ZRP by considering performance metrics like Packet Delivery Fraction, Routing Overhead and End-to-End Delay. We also simulated the performed the detection of malicious nodes using the trust value and alarm packets and observed that the packet delivery fraction of SZRP is considerably high even the number of malicious nodes is 35% of the Network size.