Resisting flooding attacks on AODV

AODV is a reactive MANET routing protocol that is vulnerable to a dramatic collapse of throughput when malicious intruders flood the network with bogus route requests. We introduce a simple mechanism to resist such attacks that can be incorporated into any reactive routing protocol. It does not require expensive cryptography or authentication mechanisms, but relies on locally applied timers and thresholds to classify nodes as malicious. No modifications to the packet formats are needed, so the overhead is a small amount of calculation at nodes, and no extra communication. Using NS2 simulation, we compare the performance of networks using AODV under flooding attacks with and without our mechanism, showing that it significantly reduces the effect of a flooding attack.