Analysis of Trade-offs between Security Features and Performance Metrics in MANET

This paper delves into the improvement of security mechanisms for the AODV protocol in MANETs, considering security-feature impacts under various types of attacks, such as Blackhole, Eavesdropping, and Sybil attacks. Comparison has been made between the base protocol and the enhanced version which includes trust-based routing, encryption, and intrusion detection mechanisms. The study has used performance metrics such as PDR, E2ED, Throughput, Energy Consumption, and Routing Efficiency. The enhanced protocol achieves 7% improvement in PDR with the effectiveness of defeating malicious attacks, though with some trade-offs in terms of E2ED, reduced throughput, and increased energy consumption. It has improved its performance in routing efficiency by decreasing the route length, increasing the discovery rate of routes, and decreasing the overhead of maintaining the routes. The results point to a balance between security and performance; thus, the added security features are justified by trade-offs. Future research should focus on optimizing these features so that energy consumption is reduced while throughput is improved, and also scalability and performance in large networks and under more complex attacks.