Survey of Secure Routing Protocols for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

The diverse network technologies and low-end wireless technologies have enabled the deployment of self-organized wireless ad hoc networks. Nodes forming such networks have the ability to autonomously organize and cooperate among them to form an infrastructure that allows data communication in the network. Routing protocols constitute the core of this cooperation. Many routing protocols have been developed to achieve data communication in wireless ad hoc networks and a large number of high quality research papers have appeared and addressed the issue of routing at length. Although they have proved their effectiveness, these routing protocols have been designed for trustworthy environments without any security requirements. However, the presence of an adversary in the network can degrade the routing functionalities and may breaking down the entire network. Therefore, securing routing protocols in such networks becomes an issue. In this paper, we survey the-state-of-the-art of secure routing protocols proposed in the literature that address routing security issue, classifying secure routing protocols in categories according to the secured protocol, and finally discussing the proposed solutions.