The impact of malicious nodes on the performance of wireless ad-hoc networks

A wireless Ad-hoc network is a group of wireless devices that are capable of communicating with each other without the need for any central management infrastructure. Such a capability, along with the mobile nature of these networks, provide many advantages. However, these same characteristics are the root of several nontrivial challenges in securing such networks. A major challenge of Ad-hoc networks is their inherent security issues. Which make them susceptible to several security risks. In particular the presence of malicious nodes which can significantly affect the overall performance. Therefore the aim of this work is studying the network performance of Adhoc networks in the presence of malicious nodes. These include the measurement of the round-trip delay network throughput, and packet loss rate. Several simulations were conducted to investigate the performance of transport layer protocols, both TCP and UDP when used by the malicious nodes. Results that are carried out using OPtimised NETwork (OPNET) simulator show a noticeable difference in the performance of the Ad-hoc network depending on which transport layer protocol is used by the malicious nodes.