Preventing packet dropping and message tampering attacks on AODV-based Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Due to recent advances in mobile wireless communication and computing technologies, Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) have become the network of choice for use in various applications. But this advantage comes with serious security concerns, in particular from a wireless transmission medium perspective where such networks may be subject to data tampering and dropping attacks. This paper enhances a recently proposed AODV-based protocol named Highly Secured Approach against Attacks on MANETs (HSAM) that deals with this issue in at least two ways: (a) by performing for the first time a simulation study of the HSAM protocol; (b) by introducing a more efficient approach to securing the routes in the route selection phase of the HSAM scheme. Simulation results are provided, showing that the proposed enhanced HSAM scheme (so-called E-HSAM) outperforms HSAM in terms of packet delivery ratio, throughput rate, and number of broken links; chosen as performance metrics, when malicious nodes are present in the network.