SA-OLSR: Security aware optimized link state routing for mobile ad hoc networks

Currently Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) has drawn great attention for being part of the ubiquitous network. Unlike the conventional network, MANETs have many unique features such as node resource constraint. That is why several efficient routing protocols have been proposed specifically for MANETs. Among these protocols, Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) is one of the four important routing protocol identified by IETF. The current OLSR protocol assumes that all nodes are trusted. However, in hostile environment, the OLSR is known to be vulnerable to various kinds of malicious attacks. In this paper, we propose a new Security Aware Optimized Link State Routing (SA-OLSR) which is a secured version of current OLSR. Our approach is based on exchanging acknowledgement between 2-hop neighbors when the control traffic is successfully received. The main advantage of our approach is that it can protect against many sophisticated attacks such as link spoofing, colluding misrelay attack, and wormhole attack without requiring any location information as well as the knowledge of complete network topology. Our simulation results show that the proposed solution can achieve higher packet delivery ratio compared to the network using the standard OLSR in the presence of malicious nodes.