A simulation analysis of flooding attack in MANET using NS-3

Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is set up with a group of mobile wireless nodes and is devoid of any dedicated routers or base stations. The wireless nodes move around freely and mutually cooperate with each other in routing and forwarding packets without the support of any fixed infrastructure or centralized administration. The topology is highly dynamic, making the routing procedure more difficult and insecure. The wireless nodes of MANET are thus susceptible to compromise and are particularly vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks launched by malicious nodes or intruders. Flooding attack is one such type of DoS attack, in which a compromised node floods the entire network by sending a large number of fake RREQs to nonexistent nodes in the network, thus resulting in network congestion. In this paper, the security of MANET AODV routing protocol is investigated by identifying the impact of flooding attack on it. A simulation study of the effects of flooding attack on the performance of the AODV routing protocol is presented. The simulation environment is implemented by using the NS-3 network simulator. It is observed that due to the presence of such malicious nodes, average percentage of packet loss in the network, average routing overhead and average bandwidth requirement — all increases, thus degrading the performance of MANET significantly.