A Secure and Efficient Link State Routing Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

Routing protocols in ad hoc networks are vulnerable to various attacks. Many solutions have been proposed to secure ad hoc routing protocols in recent research but often at the price of significant traffic and processing overhead, which may be undesirable for ad hoc networks with limited bandwidth and processing power. In this paper, we present and evaluate a secure and efficient link state routing protocol for ad hoc networks (SELRAN). We propose Secure Link State Update Procedure (SLSUP) and Secure Neighbor Establishment Procedure (SNEP) in SELRAN to counter external and internal uncoordinated attacks. We also use counter-based mechanism to reduce the broadcast overhead of the LSU packets in SELRAN, which makes SELRAN efficient in resource-constraint environments such as ad hoc networks. Analysis and simulation results show that SELRAN effectively thwarts a wide range of attacks to ad hoc routing, and is able to maintain high packet delivery ratio even in hostile environments.