The rise and fall of the AODV protocol: A testbed study on practical routing attacks

Securing the routing service of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) is a basic requirement for application scenarios such as emergency response operations. In this paper we analyze the effects of routing attacks on the Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocol. We present results of a testbed-based analysis to consider real-world characteristics of hardware as well as wireless communications. As AODV is shown to produce unstable multi-hop routes, we design and implement a mechanism to address this issue. We then present an evaluation of three selected types of malicious behavior. Our results show that our protocol-variant delivers a reliable ad-hoc routing service. Yet, it is strongly affected by routing attacks.