Towards a scalable routing approach for mobile ad-hoc networks

The Internet is evolving towards a two-fold architecture that will comprise of traditional infrastructure based networks as well as emerging self organised autonomic peripheral networks. Such Internet peripheral networks are being termed as the Internet of things (IoT) whereby smart objects and devices will be connected together in a fully distributed fashion to provide ubiquitous services through pervasive networking. Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) is regarded as one of the pervasive self-organised networks that will play a major role in autonomic future internet communication. There are several well- known challenges to be addressed in order to enable MANET deployments of large islands of interconnected smart devices. Therefore, in this paper, we present a mathematical model based analysis of various well-known routing protocols for MANETs in order to determine the scalability of these protocols. This paper analyses the scalability of the routing protocols with respect to routing overhead required by approaches while also considering the packet delivery latency, which is an important Quality of Service (QoS) metric

Adaptive and secure routing protocol for emergency mobile ad-hoc networks

The nature of Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) makes them suitable to be utilized in the context of an extreme emergency for all involved rescue teams. We use the term emergency MANETs (eMANETs) in order to describe next generation IP-based networks, which are deployed in emergency cases such as forest fires and terrorist attacks. The main goal within the realm of eMANETs is to provide emergency workers with intelligent devices such as smart phones and PDAs. This technology allows communication "islets" to be established between the members of the same or different emergency teams (policemen, firemen, paramedics). In this article, we discuss an adaptive and secure routing protocol developed for the purposes of eMANETs. We evaluate the performance of the protocol by comparing it with other widely used routing protocols for MANETs. We finally show that the overhead introduced due to security considerations is affordable to support secure ad-hoc communications among lightweight devices.Comment: 17 Pages, IJWM

A Testbed implementation for securing OLSR in mobile ad hoc networks

Contemporary personal computing devices are increasingly required to be portable and mobile enabling user's wireless access, to wired network infrastructures and services. This approach to mobile computing and communication is only appropriate in situations where a coherent infrastructure is available. There are many situations where these requirements are not fulfilled such as; developing nations, rural areas, natural disasters, and military conflicts to name but a few. A practical solution is to use mobile devices interconnected via a wireless medium to form a network, known as a Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET), and provide the services normally found in wired networks. Security in MANETs is an issue of paramount importance due to the wireless nature of the communication links. Additionally due to the lack of central administration security issues are different from conventional networks. For the purposes of this article we have used the "WMN test-bed" to enable secure routing in MANETs. The use of cryptography is an efficient proven way of securing data in communications, but some cryptographic algorithms are not as efficient as others and require more processing power, which is detrimental to MANETs. In this article we have assessed different cryptographic approaches to securing the OLSR (Optimised Link State Routing) protocol to provide a basis for research. We conclude the paper with a series of performance evaluation results regarding different cryptographic and hashing schemes. Our findings clearly show that the most efficient combination of algorithms used for authentication and encryption are SHA-1 and AES respectively. Using this combination over their counterparts will lead to a considerable reduction in processing time and delay on the network, creating an efficient transaction moving towards satisfying resource constraints and security requirements.Comment: 20 pages, 13 figure