Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs), an emerging technology, would allow vehicles to form a self-organized network without the aid of a permanent infrastructure. As a prerequisite to communication in VANETs, an efficient route between communicating nodes in the network must be established, and the routing protocol must adapt to the rapidly changing topology of vehicles in motion. This is one of the goals of VANET routing protocols. In this thesis, we present an efficient routing protocol for VANETs, called the Reliable Inter-VEhicular Routing (RIVER) protocol. RIVER utilizes an undirected graph that represents the surrounding street layout where the vertices of the graph are points at which streets curve or intersect, and the graph edges represent the street segments between those vertices. Unlike existing protocols, RIVER performs real-time, active traffic monitoring and uses this data and other data gathered through passive mechanisms to assign a reliability rating to each street edge. The protocol then uses these reliability ratings to select the most reliable route. Control messages are used to identify a node’s neighbors, determine the reliability of street edges, and to share street edge reliability information with other nodes.

Each day, the dream of seamless networking and connectivity everywhere is getting closer to become a reality. In this regard, mobile Ad-Hoc networks (MANETs) have been a hot topic in the last decade; but the amount of MANET usage nowadays confines to a tiny percentage of all our network connectivity in our everyday life, which connectivity through infrastructured networks has the major share. On the other hand, we know that future of networking belongs to Ad-Hocing , so for now we try to give our everyday infrastructure network a taste of Ad-Hocing ability; these types of networks are called Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) and routing features play a vital role in their functionality. In this thesis we examine the functionality of 3 Ad-Hoc routing protocols known as AODV, OLSR and GRP using simulation method in OPNET17.5. For this goal we set up 4 different scenarios to examine the performance of these routing protocols; these scenarios vary from each other in amount of nodes, background traffic and mobility of the nodes. Performance measurements of these protocols are done by network throughput, end-end delay of the transmitted packets and packet loss ratio as our performance metrics. After the simulation run and gathering the results we study them in a comparative view, first based on each scenario and then based on each protocol. For conclusion, as former studies suggest AODV, OLSR and DRP are among the best routing protocols for WMNs, so in this research we don’t introduce the best RP based on the obtained functionality results, instead we discuss the network conditions that each of these protocols show their best functionality in them and suggest the best routing mechanism for different networks based on the analysis from the former part.

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Auburn University, 2007. / Abstract. Includes bibliographic references (p.127-137).

Thesis (M.S.)--Auburn University, 2008. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 42-44).

Thesis (M.S. in computer science)--Washington State University, May 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on July 21, 2009). "School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science." Includes bibliographical references (p. 113-117).

Thesis--Auburn University, 2009. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 70-73).

Thesis (M.S.)--Rutgers University, 2010. / "Graduate Program in Electrical and Computer Engineering." Includes bibliographical references (p. 48-49).

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2007. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 57-59).

This thesis presents a framework for investigating opportunistic routing in Delay Tolerant Mobile Ad hoc Networks (DTMANETs), and introduces the concept of an Opportunistic Confidence Index (OCI). The OCI enables multiple opportunistic routing protocols to be applied as an adaptive group to improve DTMANET routing reliability, performance, and efficiency. The DTMANET is a recently acknowledged networkarchitecture, which is designed to address the challenging and marginal environments created by adaptive, mobile, and unreliable network node presence. Because of its ad hoc and autonomic nature, routing in a DTMANET is a very challenging problem. The design of routing protocols in such environments, which ensure a high percentage delivery rate (reliability), achieve a reasonable delivery time (performance), and at the same time maintain an acceptable communication overhead (efficiency), is of fundamental consequence to the usefulness of DTMANETs. In recent years, a number of investigations into DTMANET routing have been conducted, resulting in the emergence of a class of routing known as opportunistic routing protocols. Current research into opportunistic routing has exposed opportunities for positive impacts on DTMANET routing. To date, most investigations have concentrated upon one or other of the quality metrics of reliability, performance, or efficiency, while some approaches have pursued a balance of these metrics through assumptions of a high level of global knowledge and/or uniform mobile device behaviours. No prior research that we are aware of has studied the connection between multiple opportunistic elements and their influences upon one another, and none has demonstrated the possibility of modelling and using multiple different opportunistic elements as an adaptive group to aid the routing process in a DTMANET. This thesis investigates OCI opportunities and their viability through the design of an extensible simulation environment, which makes use of methods and techniques such as abstract modelling, opportunistic element simplification and isolation, random attribute generation and assignment, localized knowledge sharing, automated scenario generation, intelligent weight assignment and/or opportunistic element permutation. These methods and techniques are incorporated at both data acquisition and analysis phases. Our results show a significant improvement in all three metric categories. In one of the most applicable scenarios tested, OCI yielded a 31.05% message delivery increase (reliability improvement), 22.18% message delivery time reduction (performance improvement), and 73.64% routing depth decrement (efficiency improvement). We are able to conclude that the OCI approach is feasible across a range of scenarios, and that the use of multiple opportunistic elements to aid decision-making processes in DTMANET environments has value.

ABSTRACT Wireless networks are gaining popularity day by day, as users want wireless connectivity irrespective of their geographic position. There is an increasing threat of malicious nodes attacks on the Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET). Black hole attack is one of the security threat in which the traffic is redirected to such a node that actually does not exist in the network. It’s an analogy to the black hole in the universe in which things disappear. MANETs must have a secure way for transmission and communication which is quite challenging and vital issue. In order to provide secure communication and transmission, researcher worked specifically on the security issues in MANETs, and many secure routing protocols and security measures within the networks were proposed. The scope of this thesis is to study the effects of Black hole attack in MANET using both Proactive routing protocol i.e. Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) and Reactive routing protocol Ad-Hoc on Demand Distance Vector (AODV). Comparative analysis of Black Hole attack for both protocols is taken into account. The impact of Black Hole attack on the performance of MANET is evaluated finding out which protocol is more vulnerable to the attack and how much is the impact of the attack on both protocols. The measurements were taken in the light of throughput, end-to-end delay and network load. Simulation is done in Optimized Network Engineering Tool (OPNET). Previously the works done on security issues in MANET were based on reactive routing protocol like Ad-Hoc on Demand Distance Vector (AODV). Different kinds of attacks were studied, and their effects were elaborated by stating how these attacks disrupt the performance of MANET.