Abstract: Mobility and portable nature of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) has increased its popularity by two fold. MANETs have become a commonly used network for various applications. But this advantage suffers with serious security concerns, mainly a wireless transmission medium perspective where such networks may be subject to packet dropping. Mobility and portable nature of Mobile Ad hoc Network may also lead to link failure. During packet forward, valuable packets may be dropped by malicious nodes present in the network. Link error and malicious packet dropping are the two sources for packet losses in MANET. A node can act maliciously and could harm the packet sending process. Ad hoc on demand distance vector (AODV) is a popular routing protocol but is exposed to well-known packet dropping attack. Proposed system introduces a new protocol named secured Ad hoc on demand distance vector (SAODV), which can truthfully detect packet dropping attack in MANET. SAODV can detect malicious nodes by identifying dropping of routing and data packet. Packet dropping due to both link error and presence of malicious nodes can detect by SAODV. It also provides importance to preserve privacy of data.

Keywords: MANETs, malicious nodes, link error, packet dropping.