An IDS for Detection of Active Attacks against Routing inMobile Ad Hoc Networks

In recent years, wireless technology has experienced a tremendous rise in popularity and usage, opening new fields of applications in the domain of networking. One of such fields concerns Ad Hoc networks in which the mobile nodes do not rely on any predefined network infrastructure. By definition, the nature of Ad Hoc networks is dynamically changing and they have a fully decentralized topology. Hence security is hard to achieve due to the dynamic nature of the participating nodes as well as the vulnerabilities and limitations of the wireless transmission medium. In this paper, an IDS for detection of active attacks against the routing fabric of mobile Ad Hoc networks is proposed. The system is designed to take countermeasures to minimize the effectiveness of an attack and keep the performance of the network within acceptable limits. The novelty of the system lies in the fact that it does not alter the basic routing protocol of the network. The proposed architecture was simulated with OPNET network simulator and numerical results were studied and analyzed.