Scenario Based Performance Evaluation of Secure Routing in MANETs

Security in MANETs is of prime importance in several scenarios of deployment such as battlefield, event coverage, etc. The traditional non-secure routing protocols for MANETs fail to prevent against attacks such as DoS, spoofing and cache poisoning. One of the primary goals of designing secure routing protocols is to prevent the compromised nodes in the network from disrupting the route discovery and maintenance mechanisms. However, this added security comes at the cost of performance. In this paper we evaluate the performance of SEAD, a secure routing protocol based upon the proactive DSDV protocol, using a set of scenario-based experiments. We compare its performance with DSDV and the reactive protocol DSR, and analyze the tradeoffs between performance and security. The scenarios used depict critical realworld applications such as battlefield and rescue operations, which tend to have contradicting needs. Our performance evaluation gives an insight into the applicability of the three protocols under consideration and helps identify which protocol is more suitable for a given scenario.