Optimum routing protection against cumulative eavesdropping in multihop wireless networks

We investigate the risk associated with multihop wireless communications due to eavesdropping. When the same message traverses cross a multihop wireless network, potential security leaks may occur because of intelligent and collaborative eavesdroppers even if all individual links from source to destination have signal leakage below a security threshold. We termed this phenomenon “cumulative security leakage”. In this work, we quantify the cumulative security leakage problem in terms of received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the eavesdropper. We propose a cross-layer framework to mitigate such security vulnerability. Our solution involves a novel routing algorithm that uses physical (PHY) layer attributes such as SNR as security metric and is readily applicable in wireless mesh networks.