Preventing malicious packet drops in MANETs by counter based authenticated acknowledgement

Abstract

Mobile ad hoc networks are a wireless infrastructure-free network composed of heterogeneous mobile nodes. A reliable mechanism can prevent malicious packet dropping nodes is end to end acknowledgment. However, packets drop from the intermediate node due to the insufficient resources such as buffer overflow and lack of energy, and there is a chance that the reputed intermediate nodes to become malicious due to then constrained resources. Furthermore, packets drop in the network is a noteworthy problem, and it negatively impacts network performance. Thus the existing acknowledgment mechanism must be incorporated with the mitigation mechanism of the packets drop due to constrained resources. Moreover, the security strength of the mechanism is further unproved by providing integrity to the acknowledgment message and authentication to the acknowledgment sender. The goal of the paper is to enhance the existing acknowledgment based approach by providing authenticity to ACK packets and preventing packets drop due to constrained resources. Packet drops due to constrained resources are mitigated by selecting no-congested and energy-efficient intermediate nodes for communication. Authentication of ACK packets is achieved digested acknowledgment with the session key. Computation of session key is achieved by the Password-based authenticated key agreement based on the discrete logarithmic problem of Chebyshev polynomial based chaotic Maps. Performance results indicate that the computation complexity of the proposed key agreement protocol is less in comparison with modular exponential and elliptic curve-based key agreement protocols. The proposed method not only prevents the malicious packet dropping nodes but also prevents packet dropping due to constrained resources.