Critical Evaluation of Secure Routing Protocols for MANET

Mobile ad-hoc network is self organized network in which nodes are autonomous and have own routing capabilities. This is an infrastructure less network and all the nodes communicate with each other using radio frequencies. If the target node is not in the frequency range of the sending node than the source node has to rely on some intermediary node for data communication. Since the topology of such network changes regularly, it becomes very difficult to ensure the legitimacy of the participating nodes in the data transmission process. Furthermore, the MANET protocols for data transfer assume that all the nodes shall participate in the process without any malicious intentions. But malicious nodes do exist in the network which can disrupt the functioning of the network. Hence several protocols have been implemented to ensure the security of data transmission between sender and the receiver. In this paper some important secure routing protocols such as SAR, SEAD, and ARAN etc. have been analyzed on the basis of their underlying security mechanism, scalability, overhead etc.