A Survey on Present State of the Art of Intrusion Detection Systems in MANETs: Finding Research Gaps

MANET is network with mobile nodes which has no fixed infrastructure support. As the nodes are energy-constrained and have mobility in the real world, they are vulnerable to various kinds of attacks. Therefore intrusion detection system for protecting communications in such network is indispensable. In this paper we review the present state of the art of the intrusion detection systems (IDS) and discover the research gaps that give insights into the potential research areas with respect to intrusion detection in MANET. Our focus is on host based IDS, network based IDS and agent based IDS. This paper also covers attacks specific to MANET such wormhole, sinkhole etc. The existing intrusion detection systems found in the literature operate on both protocols dependent and independent approaches. Energy efficiency, routing protocols, and various techniques used to safeguard MANETs from malicious attacks were explored. The research gaps found can help in choosing right paths for future work.