The Impact of Location Based Attacks on Geographical Routing Protocols

Several applications of mobile ad hoc networks select geographical routing especially the Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) protocol due to its scalability, efficiency, and ability to support location based applications. However, there are many security issues in protecting location information, which can easily be abused by attackers. Location based adversarial activities affect the operation and performance of geographical routing protocols. There are only a few works on the literature that studied the impact of location based attacks on geographical routing. This work analyzes the impact of malicious nodes on the GPSR performance associated with fake location. This proposal identifies a set of possible location based attacks and analyzes the local problems that arise from the location based adversarial activities. Finally, it demonstrates the overall impact on the routing performance, by simulating the network in various attack scenarios. This study illustrates the effect of the adversarial activities with respect to the packet delivery ratio, overhead, average end-to-end delay, routing loops, packet dropping probability, and location error rate. The simulation results concluded that the overall routing performance degrades, depending on the type and percentage of adversaries.