Anonymous group-based routing in MANETs

Although operating as groups is required by many of ad hoc applications and privacy preservation is a critical issue in such scenarios, there is only a sparse research done on anonymous multicast routing in MANETs. Anonymity, location privacy and unlinkable communication are important privacy aspects specially in wireless environments. A potential eavesdropper may launch traffic analysis to infer privacy related information of the network. Meanwhile, the characteristics of wireless ad hoc networks such as the limited resources or dynamic topology make providing privacy very challenging in MANETs and privacy in such networks can not be achieved without appropriate protection schemes. In this paper, we propose an anonymous multicast routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks. Our protocol extends anonymous routing from unicast communication to multicast scenarios and also provides additional privacy properties. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.