Token Routing: A Power Efficient Method for Securing AODV Routing Protocol

Despite the abundance of existing secure routing protocols in ad hoc and sensor networks, real world ad hoc and sensor network applications still usually opt for routing protocols without any security consideration, mostly because of the relatively high cost for enforcing security. In order to reduce the energy overhead when enhancing the security of routing protocols, we propose a Token Routing Protocol (TRP), which is a routing security enhancement of the widely accepted AODV routing protocol. TRP employs hash-chain algorithm to generate a token, which is appended to the data packets to identify the authenticity of the routing packets and to choose correct route for data packets. As compared to the well-known AODV security enhancements such as SAODV, TRP provides comparable security with a significant reduction in energy consumption and routing packet delay by using the hash algorithm instead of public key cryptographic algorithms. Therefore TRP provides a practical energy-efficient option for routing security enhancements in AODV routing protocol.