Performance evaluation of mobile ad hoc networks under flooding‐based attacks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is an open wireless network that comprises a set of mobile, decentralized, and self‐organized nodes. Its properties render its environment susceptible to different types of attacks, which can paralyze the mobile nodes in MANET. A particularly dangerous type of attack is run primarily under flooding bogus packet mechanisms, such as hello floods, routing table overflows, exploitation of node penalizing schemes, and resource consumption attack (RCA). Flooding‐based attacks impose severe effects because they are intended to consume MANET resources, such as bandwidth, node memory, and battery power. Therefore, identifying such effects facilitates the development of countermeasures against the intrusions. In this paper, we introduce a simulation‐based study on the effects of RCA on MANET. Qual Net v5.0.2 is used to examine the severity of the effects on MANET performance metrics in terms of throughput, end‐to‐end delay, energy consumption, and routing overhead. The effects of RCA are also monitored under two combinations of four factors: we first vary the number of attackers and attackers' positions, and then modify the attackers' radio range and flooding rate. We also examine the effect of flooding mechanism on the energy consumed by resource consumption attackers. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.