A probabilistic routing disruption attack on DSR and its analysis

In this paper, we propose an attack model against DSR ad hoc network routing protocol and analyze the effects of this attack model on DSR route discovery mechanism. The analysis of the attack model includes a probabilistic formulation to estimate route discovery failure. Simulations are performed to complement the analytic model. Results show that this attack can be kept in control with minimal harm on the network, provided that there is a detection mechanism; otherwise, with the increasing rate of compromised nodes, the harm on network tends to increase. As an interesting side result, our analysis also shows that our attack model can also be used to improve the performance DSR route discovery mechanism.