Evaluation of Secure Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs)

Mobile Ad hoc networks (MANETs) have several advantages compared to traditional wireless networks. These include ease of deployment, speed of deployment and decreased dependency on a fixed infrastructure. There have been many studies done in this area to improve the quality and efficiency of the routing protocols in MANETs. However unique characteristics of MANETs topology such as open peer-to-peer architecture, dynamic network topology, shared wireless medium and limited resource (battery, memory and computation power) pose a number of non-trivial challenges to security design. These challenges and characteristics require MANETs to provide broad protection and desirable network performance. In this paper, we examine the available secure routing protocols in MANETs such as Secure OnDemand Routing Protocol – Ariadne, Secure Ad hoc Ondemand Distance Vector routing protocol – SAODV, Security Aware Routing Protocol – SAR, Secure Efficient Distance Vector Routing – SEAD, Securing the Destination Sequenced Distance Vector Routing Protocol – SDSDV, Secure Link State Routing protocol – SLSP, On-Demand Secure Routing Protocol Resilient to Byzantine Failures, Authenticated Routing for Ad-hoc Networks – ARAN, Secure Position Aided Ad hoc Routing – SPAAR. We identify the advantages and disadvantages of each protocol, we compare them based on some security parameters, and also we discuss some open challenges present in ad hoc secure routing.