Routing and Security in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) consists of a set of nodes which can form a network among themselves. MANETs have applications in areas such as military, disaster rescue operations, monitoring animal habitats, etc. where establishing fixed communication infrastructure is not feasible. Routing protocols designed for MANETs can be broadly classified as position-based (geographic), topology-based and hybrid. Geographic routing uses location information of nodes to route messages. Topology-based routing uses network state information for route discovery and maintenance. Hybrid routing protocols use features in both position-based and topology-based approaches. Position-based routing protocols route packets towards the destination using greedy forwarding (i.e., an intermediate node forwards packets to a neighbor that is closer to the destination than itself). If a node has no neighbor that is closer to the destination than itself, greedy forwarding fails. In this case, we say there is void. Different position-based routing protocols use different methods for dealing with voids. Topology-based routing protocols can be classified into on-demand (reactive) routing protocols and proactive routing protocols. Generally, on-demand routing protocols establish routes when needed by flooding route requests throughout the entire network, which is not a scalable approach. Reactive routing protocols try to maintain routes between every pair of nodes by periodically exchanging messages with each other which is not a scalable approach also. This thesis addresses some of these issues and makes the following contribution. First, we present a position-based routing protocol called Greedy Routing Protocol with Backtracking (GRB) which uses a simple backtracking technique to route around voids, unlike existing position-based routing protocols which construct planarized graph of the local network to route around voids. We compare the performance of our protocol with the well known Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) protocol and the Ad-Hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol as well as the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol. Performance evaluation shows that our protocol has less control overhead than those of DSR, AODV, and GPSR. Performance evaluation also shows that our protocol has a higher packet-delivery ratio, lower end-to-end delay, and less hop count, on average, compared to AODV, DSR and GPSR. We then present an on-demand routing protocol called ``Hybrid On-demand Greedy Routing Protocol with Backtracking for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks which uses greedy approach for route discovery. This prevents flooding route requests, unlike the existing on-demand routing protocols. This approach also helps in finding routes that have lower hop counts than AODV and DSR. Our performance evaluation confirms that our protocol performs better than AODV and DSR, on average, with respect to hop count, packet-delivery ratio and control overhead. In MANETs, all nodes need to cooperate to establish routes. Establishing secure and valid routes in the presence of adversaries is a challenge in MANETs. Some of the well-known source routing protocols presented in the literature (e.g., Ariadne and endairA) which claim to establish secure routes are susceptible to hidden channel attacks. We address this issue and present a secure routing protocol called SAriadne, based on sanitizable signatures. We show that our protocol detects and prevents hidden channel attacks

A Review of the Energy Efficient and Secure Multicast Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

This paper presents a thorough survey of recent work addressing energy efficient multicast routing protocols and secure multicast routing protocols in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). There are so many issues and solutions which witness the need of energy management and security in ad hoc wireless networks. The objective of a multicast routing protocol for MANETs is to support the propagation of data from a sender to all the receivers of a multicast group while trying to use the available bandwidth efficiently in the presence of frequent topology changes. Multicasting can improve the efficiency of the wireless link when sending multiple copies of messages by exploiting the inherent broadcast property of wireless transmission. Secure multicast routing plays a significant role in MANETs. However, offering energy efficient and secure multicast routing is a difficult and challenging task. In recent years, various multicast routing protocols have been proposed for MANETs. These protocols have distinguishing features and use different mechanismsComment: 15 page

A Lightweight and Attack Resistant Authenticated Routing Protocol for Mobile Adhoc Networks

In mobile ad hoc networks, by attacking the corresponding routing protocol, an attacker can easily disturb the operations of the network. For ad hoc networks, till now many secured routing protocols have been proposed which contains some disadvantages. Therefore security in ad hoc networks is a controversial area till now. In this paper, we proposed a Lightweight and Attack Resistant Authenticated Routing Protocol (LARARP) for mobile ad hoc networks. For the route discovery attacks in MANET routing protocols, our protocol gives an effective security. It supports the node to drop the invalid packets earlier by detecting the malicious nodes quickly by verifying the digital signatures of all the intermediate nodes. It punishes the misbehaving nodes by decrementing a credit counter and rewards the well behaving nodes by incrementing the credit counter. Thus it prevents uncompromised nodes from attacking the routes with malicious or compromised nodes. It is also used to prevent the denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. The efficiency and effectiveness of LARARP are verified through the detailed simulation studies.Comment: 14 Pages, IJWM

Secure Anonymous Routing for MANETs Using Distributed Dynamic Random Path Selection

Most of the MANET security research has so far focused on providing routing security and confidentiality to the data packets, but less has been done to ensure privacy and anonymity of the communicating entities. In this paper, we propose a routing protocol which ensures anonymity, privacy of the user. This is achieved by randomly selecting next hop at each intermediate. This protocol also provides data security using public key ciphers. The protocol is simulated using in-house simulator written in C with OpenSSL crypto APIs. The robustness of our protocol is evaluated against known security attacks

Fuzzy based load and energy aware multipath routing for mobile ad hoc networks

Routing is a challenging task in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) due to their dynamic topology and lack of central administration. As a consequence of un-predictable topology changes of such networks, routing protocols employed need to accurately capture the delay, load, available bandwidth and residual node energy at various locations of the network for effective energy and load balancing. This paper presents a fuzzy logic based scheme that ensures delay, load and energy aware routing to avoid congestion and minimise end-to-end delay in MANETs. In the proposed approach, forwarding delay, average load, available bandwidth and residual battery energy at a mobile node are given as inputs to a fuzzy inference engine to determine the traffic distribution possibility from that node based on the given fuzzy rules. Based on the output from the fuzzy system, traffic is distributed over fail-safe multiple routes to reduce the load at a congested node. Through simulation results, we show that our approach reduces end-to-end delay, packet drop and average energy consumption and increases packet delivery ratio for constant bit rate (CBR) traffic when compared with the popular Ad hoc On-demand Multipath Distance Vector (AOMDV) routing protocol

An enhanced Multipath Strategy in Mobile Ad hoc Routing Protocols

The various routing protocols in Mobile Ad hoc Networks follow different strategies to send the information from one node to another. The nodes in the network are non static and they move randomly and are prone to link failure which makes always to find new routes to the destination. This research mainly focused on the study of the characteristics of multipath routing protocols in MANETS. Two of the multipath routing protocols were investigated and a comparative study along with simulation using NS2 was done between DSR and AODV to propose an enhanced approach to reach the destination maintaining the QoS. A possible optimization to the DSR and AODV routing protocols was proposed to make no node to be overburdened by distributing the load after finding the alternate multipath routes which were discovered in the Route discovery process. The simulation shows that the differences in the protocol highlighted major differences with the protocol performance. These differences have been analyzed with various network size, mobility, and network load. A new search table named Search of Next Node Enquiry Table (SONNET) was proposed to find the best neighbor node. Using SONNET the node selects the neighbor which can be reached in less number of hops and with less time delay and maintaining the QoS