An Anonymous Routing Protocol with The Local-repair Mechanism for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, we first define the requirements on anonymity and security properties of the routing protocol in mobile ad hoc networks, and then propose a new anonymous routing protocol with the local-repair mechanism. Detailed analysis shows that our protocol achieves both anonymity and security properties defined. A major challenge in designing anonymous routing protocols is to reduce computation and communication costs. To overcome this challenge, our protocol is design to require neither asymmetric nor symmetric encryption/decryption while updating the flooding route requests; more importantly, once a route is broken, instead of re-launching a new costly flooding route discovery process like previous work, our protocol provides a local-repair mechanism to fix broken parts of a route without compromising anonymity