Experimental Evaluation of Flooding Attacks in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc networks will often be deployed in environments where the nodes of the networks are unattended and have little or no physical protection against tampering. The nodes of mobile ad hoc networks are thus susceptible to compromise. The networks are particularly vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks launched through compromised nodes or intruders. In this paper, we investigated the effects of flooding attacks in Network Simulation 2 (ns-2) and measured the packet delivery ratio and packet delay under different flooding frequency and different number of attack nodes. Simulation results show that with the increase the flooding frequency and the number of attack nodes, network performance drops. Meanwhile the packet delay firstly increases and then decline to a value of stability in the end.