Evaluation of Secure Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs)

Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) have several advantages compared to traditional wireless networks. These include ease of deployment, speed of deployment and decreased dependency on a fixed infrastructure. There have been many studies done in this area to improve the quality and efficiency of the routing protocols in MANETs. However, unique characteristics of MANETs topology such as open peer-to-peer architecture, dynamic network topology, shared wireless medium and limited resource (battery, memory and computation power) pose a number of non-trivial challenges to security design. These challenges and characteristics require MANETs to provide broad protection and desirable network performance.