A Lightweight Encryption Scheme for Network-Coded Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Energy saving is an important issue in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). Recent studies show that network coding can help reduce the energy consumption in MANETs by using less transmissions. However, apart from transmission cost, there are other sources of energy consumption, e.g., data encryption/decryption. In this paper, we study how to leverage network coding to reduce the energy consumed by data encryption in MANETs. It is interesting that network coding has a nice property of intrinsic security, based on which encryption can be done quite efficiently. To this end, we propose P-Coding, a lightweight encryption scheme to provide confidentiality for network-coded MANETs in an energy-efficient way. The basic idea of P-Coding is to let the source randomly permute the symbols of each packet (which is prefixed with its coding vector), before performing network coding operations. Without knowing the permutation, eavesdroppers cannot locate coding vectors for correct decoding, and thus cannot obtain any meaningful information. We demonstrate that due to its lightweight nature, P-Coding incurs minimal energy consumption compared to other encryption schemes.