Secure and Reliable Autoconfiguration Protocol (SRACP) for MANETs

Autoconfiguration in mobile ad-hoc networks is a challenging mechanism in a potentially hostile environment. Autoconfiguration schemes are prone to various types of security threats that interfere or even paralyze the mechanism. In this paper an autoconfiguration scheme that overcomes the security threats has been proposed. The protocol uses a grid based hierarchical architecture to resolve the address duplication detection. Specialized agent nodes with high confidence score are dynamically selected for the duplication detection process. The selected agents use digital signatures for authentication and also a hashing scheme to check the tampered messages during communication. The proposed protocol has been simulated and compared with three other schemes. The results show that even with added security features the protocol has fairly good protocol overhead, address acquisition delay and packet losses when compared to the similar schemes. The analyses also conclude that protocol provides high security in unsafe environments.