Secure Routing Techniques for MANETs

— In this paper we present a survey of various existing secure routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). A mobile ad-hoc network is a self-configuring network of mobile nodes, connected by wireless links, which act as routers and are free to move randomly and organize themselves arbitrarily. These types of networks operate in the absence of any fixed infrastructure which makes them easy to deploy but it becomes difficult to make use of the existing routing techniques for network services. In order to facilitate communication within the network, a Routing Protocol (RP) is used to discover routes between nodes. The primary goal of such an ad-hoc network RP is correct and efficient route establishment between a pair of nodes so that messages may be delivered in time. The wireless and distributed nature of MANETs poses security a great challenge to system designers. This paper contains two main sections: first section presents a short literature study on various types of security attacks and routing security schemes that have been proposed to prevent and/or detect these attacks and second gives a state-or-the-art review of the existing secure Routing Protocols designed for MANETs with a comparison for typical representatives.