Effects of denial of service attack in mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks are often deployed in environments where the nodes of the networks are unattended and have little or no physical protection against tampering. The nodes of mobile ad hoc networks are thus susceptible to compromise. The networks are particularly vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks launched through compromised nodes or intruders. In this paper, we investigated the effects of flooding attacks in network simulation 2 (NS-2) and measured the packet delivery ratio and packet delay under different flooding frequencies and different numbers of attack nodes. Simulation results show that with the increase the flooding frequencies and the numbers of attack nodes, network performance drops. But when the frequency of flooding attacks is greater than a value, the performance decrease gets smooth. Meanwhile the packet delay firstly increases and then declines to a value of stability at the end.