Analysis and Feasibility of Reactive Routing Protocols with Malicious Nodes in MANETs

Ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile nodes dynamically forming a temporary network without the use of any network infrastructure or centralized administration. In this work, an attempt has been made to study the performance of two prominent on demand reactive routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks i.e. DSR and AODV. Although DSR and AODV share similar on-demand behavior, the differences in the protocol mechanisms can lead to significant performance differentials. The performance differentials are analyzed in terms of throughput, packet dropped and packet lost. However, due to nature of transmission in error prone shared wireless medium reaches all the nodes in communication range, the nodes may misbehave selfishly. In this paper, we have also analyzed reactive protocols in presence of the malicious nodes.