Performance Investigations of Reactive Routing Protocols under Flooding Attack in MANET

MANET is combination of mobile nodes which uses multi hop transmission for communication. Due to highly dynamic topology, routing in MANET is challenging task, moreover presence of malicious nodes make the overall network very insecure. In flooding attack, malicious nodes will flood large amount of useless data packets to cause Denial of Service. This paper aims to compare the performance of various reactive routing protocols such as AODV, DSR, and DYMO under DDOS attack; as reactive protocols causes less routing overhead. The impact of Attack is evaluated with respect to Flooding Attack Model, it is being observed that presence of malicious nodes in MANET significantly reduces the performance, the aim is to find the protocol which outperforms under Attack, so that further improvements needs to be done for improving the performance of MANET under Flooding Attack. The simulator used is Qualnet. Performance metrics taken for comparison (AODV, DSR, and DYMO) is Packet Delivery Ratio, Throughput, Average end to end delay, Jitter etc.