Secure and Reliable Multi-Path Routing Protocol for Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

Multi-hop Wireless Networks require wireless devices communicating through wireless channels to forward the information from the source to the destination. Therefore, finding an optimal path to route the exchanged data between nodes is a major challenge. In recent years, many researchers are interested in this topic and they are proposing many routing protocols which allow the nodes to learn some multi-hop path to exchange data between them. However, securing these routing protocols is a challenging task due to the various characteristics of the Multi-hop Wireless Networks such as the limited capacity of the nodes and their mobility. Securing a routing protocol is necessary to protect the route discovery phase as well as the data transmission phase against any malicious attacks such as the Man-in-the-middle and the node impersonation. These attacks aim to increase the resource consumption and decrease the quality of services in the networks. In this paper, we propose a secure routing protocol for Multi-hop Wireless Network. The proposed protocol is a tradeoff between the routing performance in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, the loss rate and the routing security in terms of confidentiality, integrity and authentication. In order to secure the data transmission phase after the routes selection, the nodes of each route contribute in establishing a group key using to encrypt the exchanged data between the source and the destination. Performance evaluation based on Network Simulator 2 (NS-2) and security analysis ensure that the proposed protocol is secure and it improves the routing performance as compared with the Secure Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (SAODV).