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

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio

A Survey on Wireless Sensor Network Security

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest in the research community due their wide range of applications. Due to distributed nature of these networks and their deployment in remote areas, these networks are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their proper functioning. This problem is more critical if the network is deployed for some mission-critical applications such as in a tactical battlefield. Random failure of nodes is also very likely in real-life deployment scenarios. Due to resource constraints in the sensor nodes, traditional security mechanisms with large overhead of computation and communication are infeasible in WSNs. Security in sensor networks is, therefore, a particularly challenging task. This paper discusses the current state of the art in security mechanisms for WSNs. Various types of attacks are discussed and their countermeasures presented. A brief discussion on the future direction of research in WSN security is also included.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 2 table

Efficient Micro-Mobility using Intra-domain Multicast-based Mechanisms (M&M)

One of the most important metrics in the design of IP mobility protocols is the handover performance. The current Mobile IP (MIP) standard has been shown to exhibit poor handover performance. Most other work attempts to modify MIP to slightly improve its efficiency, while others propose complex techniques to replace MIP. Rather than taking these approaches, we instead propose a new architecture for providing efficient and smooth handover, while being able to co-exist and inter-operate with other technologies. Specifically, we propose an intra-domain multicast-based mobility architecture, where a visiting mobile is assigned a multicast address to use while moving within a domain. Efficient handover is achieved using standard multicast join/prune mechanisms. Two approaches are proposed and contrasted. The first introduces the concept proxy-based mobility, while the other uses algorithmic mapping to obtain the multicast address of visiting mobiles. We show that the algorithmic mapping approach has several advantages over the proxy approach, and provide mechanisms to support it. Network simulation (using NS-2) is used to evaluate our scheme and compare it to other routing-based micro-mobility schemes - CIP and HAWAII. The proactive handover results show that both M&M and CIP shows low handoff delay and packet reordering depth as compared to HAWAII. The reason for M&M's comparable performance with CIP is that both use bi-cast in proactive handover. The M&M, however, handles multiple border routers in a domain, where CIP fails. We also provide a handover algorithm leveraging the proactive path setup capability of M&M, which is expected to outperform CIP in case of reactive handover.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figure

Efficient algorithm for mobile multicast using anycast group

The authors present a novel and efficient multicast algorithm that aims to reduce delay and communication cost for the registration between mobile nodes and mobility agents and solicitation for foreign agent services based on the mobile IP. The protocol applies anycast group technology to support multicast transmissions for both mobile nodes and home/foreign agents. Mobile hosts use anycast tunnelling to connect to the nearest available home/foreign agent where an agent is able to forward the multicast messages by selecting an anycast route to a multicast router so as to reduce the end-to-end delay. The performance analysis and experiments demonstrated that the proposed algorithm is able to enhance the performance over existing remote subscription and bidirectional tunnelling approaches regardless of the locations of mobile nodes/hosts<br /

Mobile object location discovery in unpredictable environments

Emerging mobile and ubiquitous computing environments present hard challenges to software engineering. The use of mobile code has been suggested as a natural fit for simplifing software development for these environments. However, the task of discovering mobile code location becomes a problem in unpredictable environments when using existing strategies, designed with fixed and relatively stable networks in mind. This paper introduces AMOS, a mobile code platform augmented with a structured overlay network. We demonstrate how the location discovery strategy of AMOS has better reliability and scalability properties than existing approaches, with minimal communication overhead. Finally, we demonstrate how AMOS can provide autonomous distribution of effort fairly throughout a network using probabilistic methods that requires no global knowledge of host capabilities

Roaming Real-Time Applications - Mobility Services in IPv6 Networks

Emerging mobility standards within the next generation Internet Protocol, IPv6, promise to continuously operate devices roaming between IP networks. Associated with the paradigm of ubiquitous computing and communication, network technology is on the spot to deliver voice and videoconferencing as a standard internet solution. However, current roaming procedures are too slow, to remain seamless for real-time applications. Multicast mobility still waits for a convincing design. This paper investigates the temporal behaviour of mobile IPv6 with dedicated focus on topological impacts. Extending the hierarchical mobile IPv6 approach we suggest protocol improvements for a continuous handover, which may serve bidirectional multicast communication, as well. Along this line a multicast mobility concept is introduced as a service for clients and sources, as they are of dedicated importance in multipoint conferencing applications. The mechanisms introduced do not rely on assumptions of any specific multicast routing protocol in use.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figure

Resilient networking in wireless sensor networks

This report deals with security in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), especially in network layer. Multiple secure routing protocols have been proposed in the literature. However, they often use the cryptography to secure routing functionalities. The cryptography alone is not enough to defend against multiple attacks due to the node compromise. Therefore, we need more algorithmic solutions. In this report, we focus on the behavior of routing protocols to determine which properties make them more resilient to attacks. Our aim is to find some answers to the following questions. Are there any existing protocols, not designed initially for security, but which already contain some inherently resilient properties against attacks under which some portion of the network nodes is compromised? If yes, which specific behaviors are making these protocols more resilient? We propose in this report an overview of security strategies for WSNs in general, including existing attacks and defensive measures. In this report we focus at the network layer in particular, and an analysis of the behavior of four particular routing protocols is provided to determine their inherent resiliency to insider attacks. The protocols considered are: Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Gradient-Based Routing (GBR), Greedy Forwarding (GF) and Random Walk Routing (RWR)