Performance comparison between Ad Hoc On Demand Distance Vector and Dynamic Source Routing Protocols with security encryption using OPNET

Application for wireless networking has been evolving rapidly and is becoming an integral part in our everyday life. Also with the recent performance advancement in wireless communication technologies, mobile wireless ad-hoc networks has been used in many areas such as military, health and commercial applications. Mobile ad hoc networks utilize radio waves and microwaves to maintain communication channel between computers. 802.11 (Wi-Fi) is the pre-eminent technology for building general purpose wireless networks. Mobile ad-hoc networking (MANET) utilize the Internet Protocol (IP) suite and aims at supporting robust and efficient operation by incorporating routing functionality into the mobile nodes. MANET is among one of the wireless networks that uses 802.11 to transmit data from the source to the destination. Since MANET is used in applications like defense, security is of vital importance due to its wireless nature. Wireless networks are vulnerable to attacks like eavesdropping, Man-In-The-Middle-Attack (MITM), hijacking, and so are MANETs. A malicious node can get within the wireless range of the nodes in the MANET and can disrupt the communication process. Various routing protocols have been proposed using encryption techniques to protect routing in MANETs. In this thesis, I implemented security encryption techniques (SHA-1 and RSA)in two reactive routing protocols which are Ad Hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) routing protocol and compared their network performance using performance evaluation parameters: Average end-to-end-delay, routing load, packet delivery fraction. Encryption techniques like SHA-1 and RSA were used to maintain the confidentiality and the integrity of the messages send by the nodes in the network. There have been several researches so for but no one has ever compared the performance of secured MANET protocols. I am going one step further by comparing the secured routing protocols which would be helpful in determining which protocol performs better that can be used in scenario where security is of utmost importance