Robust routing in malicious environment for ad hoc networks

Abstract

Secure routing in ad hoc networks has been extensively studied in recent years. The vast majority of this work, however, has only focused on providing authenticity of the route. Availability of the network in a malicious environment has largely been ignored. In this paper, we divide the secure routing problem into two layers. The first layer provides authenticated routing and the second layer provides a route selection algorithm that selects a route with the high-est probability of successful delivery rather than the shortest route. We provide a metric for evaluating this probability. We provide simulation results that demonstrate that our approach increases the throughput by at least ten percent in a network where fifty percent of the nodes are malicious when compared to an approach that selects the shortest route. Furthermore, our approach incurs only a small delay when compared to the delay along the shortest route. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.