The Impact of Resource Consumption Attack on Mobile Ad-hoc Network Routing

Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a temporary network of mobile nodes where mobile nodes communicate with each other through wireless links with no fixed infrastructure and no centralized control. Each mobile node in such a scenario acts as both a router and host. Security is an important issue in the MANET environment because of its dynamic topology and limited range of each mobile host’s wireless transmissions. This paper introduces a simulation-based study for the impact of Resource Consumption Attack (RCA) on MANET performance. RCA is one of the Denial of Service attacks (DoS) in which the attacker keeps broadcasting Route Request (RREQ) packets in order to degrade the network overall performance. Specifically, this paper examined how differing the number of attackers and their positions could affect MANET packet delivery ratio and delay jitter. The paper results open the door for suggesting an intrusion detection system in order to mitigate and prevent RCA terrible effects on MANET.