PERFORMANCE EVALUATION AND ENHANCEMENT OF MANET ROUTING PROTOCOLS UNDER JAMMING ATTACKS

Mobile Ad-hoc networks (MANETs) refer to self-organizing wireless networks consisting of mobile nodes that communicate among themselves over possibly multihop paths without the help of any infrastructure. In such communications environment, security has become a primary concern in order to provide protected communication between mobile nodes; especially in applications such as battlefields, military applications, and other emergency and disaster application. The conventional security approaches such as encryption, authentication, access control and digital signatures provide the first line of defense. While as a second line of defense, Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and cooperation enforcement mechanisms have been implemented to detect misbehaving nodes. In this paper, we present the results of a simulation study to compare the performance of four MANET routing protocols, namely, Ad hoc on demand routing Vector (AODV), Temporally Oriented Routing Algorithm (TORA), Gateway Routing Protocol (GRP), and Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR). The simulation results are extracted and compared in three cases: 1. Normal operation without attacks applied, 2. Operation with different types of jamming attacks applied and 3. Operation with jamming attacks applied but an IDS introduced to secure the routing protocols. The simulations of the network were carried again using the well known Optimized Network (OPNET) simulator Academic Ver. 14.5. Simulation results showed that the lead of AODV and OLSR protocols over TORA and GRP in routing traffic for dynamic changing topology in all simulation cases. Also, the results illustrated that the presence of jamming attacks has badly degraded the performance of the network. The worst degradation was in case of the Frequency-Swept Jammer. On the other hand, the performance of all MANET routing protocols, in the presence of jamming attacks, have been greatly enhanced when an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) was added to the nodes. Simulation results indicated that the use of the intrusion detection system (IDS) has improved the performance of the network and reduced the effect of the jamming attacks