A Secured On-Demand Routing Protocol in Multi-hop Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

摘要

Wireless ad hoe networks (MANETs) bring many new applications nowadays and many routing protocols have been proposed to solve the multi-hop communication problem in these networks. However, due to the open nature of wireless channel, security is hardly guaranteed. Secured routing protocol is one of the challenging tasks since security is not natively implemented in ad hoc routing, and many existing routing protocols are complicated and vulnerable against network attacks. In this paper, we give an implementation of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) exploiting the mechanism of route discovery and route reply to publish certificate in a distributed manner, which results in secured communication, authentication, integrity, confidentiality, and detecting attacks in MANETs. Our proposed protocol is simple because it utilizes the underlying protocol as a support for certificate publishing. Consequently, it does not affect the network performance. In addition, all the operations in the proposed protocol are done in the network layer making it useful for heterogeneous networks since it has not any additional relation with the other network layers as MAC and PHY. Complexity analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol is scalable and can be applied to the large-scale networks.