Survivability Analysis of MANET Routing Protocols under DOS Attacks

Abstract

The network capability to accomplish its functions in a timely fashion under failures and attacks is known as survivability. Ad hoc routing protocols have been studied and extended to various domains, such as Intelligent Transport Systems (ITSs), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), underwater acoustic networks, and Internet of Things (IoT) focusing on different aspects, such as security, QoS, energy. The existing solutions proposed in this domain incur substantial overhead and eventually become burden on the network, especially when there are fewer attacks or no attack at all. There is a need that the effectiveness of these routing protocols be analyzed in the presence of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks without any intrusion detection or prevention system. This will enable us to establish and identify the inherently stable routing protocols that are capable to survive longer in the presence of these attacks. This work presents a DoS attack case study to perform theoretical analysis of survivability on node and network level in the presence of DoS attacks. We evaluate the performance of reactive and proactive routing protocols and analyse their survivability. For experimentation, we use NS-2 simulator without detection or prevention capabilities. Results show that proactive protocols perform better in terms of throughput, overhead and packet drop.