MANET Security Issues

When a routing protocol for manet Networks (mobile and ad hoc networks) does a route discovery, it does not discover the shortest route but the route through which the route request flood traveled faster. In addition, since nodes are moving, a route that was the shortest one at discovery time might stop being so in quite a short period of time. This causes, not only a much bigger end-to-end delay, but also more collisions and faster power consumption. In order to avoid all the performance loss due to these problems, this paper develops a technique to periodically discover shortcuts to the active routes that can be used with any destination vector routing protocol. It also shows how the same mechanism can be used as a bidirectional route recovery mechanism.[1] We consider the problem of incorporating security mechanisms into routing protocols for ad hoc networks. Canned security solutions like IPSec are not applicable. We look at AODV in detail and develop a security mechanism to protect its routing information. We also briefly discuss whether our techniques would also be applicable to other similar routing protocols and about how a key management scheme could be used in conjunction with the solution that we provide. [2]