There are many routing protocols proposed for Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) [1]. However most of these protocols are analysed by two standard techniques: simulation and security analysis. There has been a lack of work on the analysis and performance of secure routing protocols in real network test-bed. In this paper, a quantitative set of results for the performance comparison between Adaptive On-demand Distance Vector (AODV)[2] and Secure-AODV (SAODV) [3] routing protocols is presented by implementing a small-scale experimental test bed, which consists of 6 laptops within a 17m by 7m office environment. A further comparison is made with results obtained via simulation techniques using OPNET simulation tool [4]. The workload included TCP traffic. Results show that SAODV performance is effective in preventing routing messages tampering and data dropping attacks.