A secure AODV routing protocol with node authentication

Indeed, MANET's are an emerging technology, evolved to provide users with facility to establish Ad-hoc networks for seamless communication. Routing is a major issue in MANET's. AODV is considered as one of most efficient routing protocol in MANET's but, its performance is adversely effected by various security attacks. A routing protocol can be attacked in many ways so as to disrupt the routing process by either dropping the packets or by changing the path of packet or by inserting false packets in the network. Hence, securing routing protocols is a major security challenge in MANET's, so as to achieve desirable performance. In this paper we propose a simple mechanism to secure AODV routing protocol. This mechanism enables node authentication before route establishment by embedding digital certificate in HELLO packet, so that any unauthorized entity cannot participate in the routing process. Thus, performance of AODV protocol s enhance due to avoidance of numerous kinds of attacks such as wormhole attack, man in middle attack, Sybil attack etc. The simulation of the proposed mechanism has shown significant improvement in the performance of AODV.