LSR: A location secure routing protocol for ad hoc networks

For safety and privacy protection, nodes participating in ad hoc networks must keep their precise location in secret. When having to report its location (for routing purposes, etc.), a node can report only a cloaking region, a spatial region that contains its current position. Reducing location resolution has a significant impact on the applications that rely on nodes' location information. These applications can become less efficient. Some may not even function. Moreover, operations such as packet forwarding may allow an adversary to refine a node's location resolution, thus reversing the effect of location cloaking in safety and privacy protection. In this paper, we investigate these problems in the context of geographic ad hoc routing and propose a novel concept called safe link. A network link is considered safe if sending and receiving of a data packet do not allow an adversary to refine the sender and receiver's location. With this concept in place, we develop a new secure routing protocol that can work with inaccurate location and construct a routing path using only safe links. We evaluate the performance of the proposed technique under various network conditions using simulation. Detailed results are presented to provide the insight of the impact of safety and privacy protection on packet delivery.