In this paper, we investigate the impact of Route REQuest (RREQ) flooding attack on mobile ad hoc network (MANET). RREQ flooding is performed by nodes that intend to degrade the network performance and are generally called malicious nodes. Malicious nodes behave like legitimate nodes present in the network, only with a single difference that they perform route discoveries very frequently as compared to legitimate nodes. Using simulations, we show that the basic route discovery mechanism used by

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... popular reactive protocols such as Ad Hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Distance Source Routing (DSR) can be exploited by such malicious nodes to bring down the network performance drastically. The major objective of this'simulationthis'simulation based study is to figure out the reactive protocol that performs better under RREQ flooding attack so that, it could further be improved to detect and isolate malicious node(s) to ensure security in MANET. Extensive simulations are performed using network simulator NS-2 and performance of network is measured using parameters such as Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), Average End-To-End Delay, Throughput and Jitter.