Safeguarding ad hoc networks with a self-organized membership control system

One of the key challenges for ad hoc networks is providing distributed membership control. This paper introduces a self-organized mechanism to control user access to ad hoc networks without requiring any infrastructure or a central administration entity. Our mechanism authenticates and monitors nodes with a structure that we call controller set, which is robust to the dynamic network membership. We develop analytical models for evaluating the proposal and validate them through simulations. The analysis shows that the proposed scheme is robust even to collusion attacks and provides availability up to 90% better than proposals based on threshold cryptography. The performance improvement arises mostly from the controller sets capability to recover after network partitions and from the identification and exclusion of malicious nodes. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.