A Comprehensive study of AODV Protocol Resilience Against Routing Attacks in MANETs

Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) without fixed infrastructure depend on dynamic node collaboration for communication. However, its decentralized design renders routing vulnerable to several attacks, including black hole attack (BHA), gray hole attack (GHA), wormhole attack (WHA), rushing attacks (RA), Sybil attacks (SA), flooding attack (FA), packet dropping attack (PDA), and sinkhole attack (SKA). These attacks degrade network performance, such as low throughput, high packet loss, and increased end-to-end delay. Understanding these assaults is crucial for strengthening MANET security. Evaluating their impact helps identify critical threats and build effective mitigation measures to improve network resilience. This paper assesses AODV under eight routing attacks using NS2. Two scenarios (with and without attacks) and three network changes (speed, node density, and simulation time) are explored. Key performance indicators like throughput, PDR, end-to-end delay, and control overhead are studied. Results suggest that BHA is the most disruptive, although other attacks also demonstrate equal severity. The study presents a ranked classification of attack severity, delivering insights to secure routing protocol design.