Defending Against RREQ Flooding Attack in AODV in MANETS

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) is an infrastructure less network, where each node provides a relay mechanism for data to reach the final destination. There is no centralised entity in MANETs to administer the nodes, this makes it challenging to make the network self-driven, and secure. MANETs have applications in communication in disaster and military where infrastructure for communications are unavailable. However, as MANETs use wireless transmission and the nodes are deployed in hostile conditions, the network is vulnerable to numerous attacks. Because of which security becomes one of the primary concerns for MANETs. Flooding attack is one of the many attacks that possess serious threat to performance of MANETs as it consumes bandwidths by flooding unnecessary data in the network. This paper proposed a detection and prevention mechanism for flooding attack in MANETs. Attack is simulated on NS2 simulator and the results are positive for detection and prevention of flooding of request packets in AODV routing protocol which is mostly used in MANETs.