A Scheme to Control Flooding of Fake Route Requests in Ad-hoc Networks

The use of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) has increased manifold in recent times. Reactive routing protocols like AODV [6] and DSR [7], used in MANETs, flood the network with route requests whenever a new route is to be discovered. This technique of flooding can be easily misused by malicious nodes to disrupt the network. Generally all nodes have a limit beyond which requests cannot be sent. Malicious nodes can easily bypass this limit and send out large numbers of fabricated route requests in the network, flooding other nodes which ultimately waste all of their processing and battery power in forwarding them. As a result, genuine route requests get ignored and many routes do not get a chance to form. In this paper, we propose a method by which this malicious flooding of route requests can be effectively controlled. We show by means of reasoning and simulation that our scheme enhances the efficiency and throughput of the network.