A Hierarchical Anonymous Routing Scheme for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Privacy and anonymity are critical security issues to many large-scale MANET applications such as military communication networks. These applications are more likely deploying the networks heterogeneously and hierarchically due to administrative needs or routing efficiency. When the size of the network scales up, the routing overhead incurred by existing flat anonymous routing protocols increases fast as the required number of public key operations increases. This results in deteriorated routing and data communication performance. In this paper, we introduce a novel hierarchical anonymous on-demand routing protocol tackling this limitation. In addition to guaranteeing routing and data delivering security, the scheme provides two levels of anonymity: intra-group and inter-group. By exploiting the hierarchical network structure, it effectively controls computational overhead while preserving anonymity, hence accommodates to larger-scale MANETs