A Secure and Efficient Routing Protocol with Genetic Algorithm in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Routing in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) is a challenging task due to its nature of open medium, infrastructurelessness, dynamicity and no trusted central authority. In MANET, a node can be compromised during the route discovery process. Attackers from inside or outside can easily exploit the network. Several secure routing protocols have been proposed for MANETs. In this paper, Ad-Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol is considered due to the fact that it uses the shortest number of wireless hops towards a destination as the primary metric for selecting a route with independence of the traffic congestion. To add security to AODV, Secure AODV was designed to enhance security services to the original AODV. Secure AODV protocol has been designed with cryptographic techniques such as digital signatures and hash chains, which can have a significant impact on the routing performance of AODV routing protocol. To improve efficiency of SAODV, Enhanced SAODV (ESAODV) was proposed based on Genetic Algorithm and alternative path. The genetic algorithm optimizes the routes in terms of selected metrics. The performance and impacts of using AODV, S-AODV and ESAODV routing protocols were compared using NS-2 Simulator. The simulation results demonstrated that using the proposed mechanism could significantly decrease the End-to-end delay and routing overhead.