Vulnerabilities of ad hoc network routing protocols to MAC misbehavior

In a mobile ad hoc network (MANET), adversaries could compromise network functionality by attacking the physical layer, the MAC layer, or the network layer. Significant research efforts have been made towards increasing the survivability of MANET either by developing secure routing algorithms or by improving the robustness of MAC layer protocol in the presence of selfish or compromised nodes. In addition, some recent studies have focused on quantifying the resiliency of MANET against MAC layer misbehaviors; however little work has been done on quantifying the impact of these misbehaviors on the performance of ad hoc routing protocols. In this paper, we review some of MANET link layer vulnerabilities, we study their impacts on network layer performance and compare the performance of two prominent on-demand routing protocols (AODV and DSR). We show that simple attacks on the link layer could propagate to the upper network layer and disrupt the routing mechanism, therefore causing devastating effects on the overall network performance. Although several secure ad hoc routing protocols have been proposed, none of them are resilient to MAC misbehaviors.