A Review of Routing Protocols and Attacks in Mobile Ad-hoc Network

A Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is a group of wireless mobile devices or nodes that communicate with each other without any help of a pre-installed infrastructure and centralized access points. The mobility and the easy use of mobile devices have motivated researches, to develop MANET protocols to exploit a reliable communication facilities provided by these devices. There are number issues such as medium access control, routing, resource management, congestion control and power control which affects the reliability of secured communication in MANET. Routing is an important issue in MANET since the establishment of effective communication between nodes is a challenging task due to the dynamic network topology. Routing is the process of selecting paths in a network to transmit data packets from one node to another node in the network. Due to the lack of a predefined centralized administration for route discovery process which leaves MANET vulnerable to attacks, that results in degradation in the performance of the network. The development of an effective routing protocol to prevent against various attacks in MANET is important for secured transmission of data between mobile nodes. This research paper reviews various attacks posed on routing and existing routing protocols to provide secure transmission of data between nodes in mobile ad-hoc networks. Index Terms MANET, routing attacks, routing protocols, security.