SHARP: Secured Hierarchical Anonymous Routing Protocol for MANETs

Mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is one of the developing fields for research and development of wireless network. MANETs are self-organizing, infrastructure less, independent, dynamic topology based, open and decentralized networks. This is an ideal choice for uses such as communication and data sharing. Due to the open and decentralized nature of the network the nodes can join or leave the network as they wish. There is no centralized authority to maintain the membership of nodes in the network. In MANETs security is the major concern in applications such as communication and data sharing. These are so many chances of different types of attacks due to self- organizing property of MANETs. Malicious attacker may try to attack the data packets by tracing the route. They may try to find the source and destination through different types attacks. MANETs are vulnerable to malicious attackers that target to damage and analyze data and traffic analysis by communication eavesdropping or attacking routing protocols. Anonymous routing protocols are used by MANETs that hides the identity of nodes as well as routes from outside observers. In MANETs anonymity means identity and location anonymity of data sources and destinations as well as route anonymity. However existing anonymous routing protocols have significantly high cost, which worsens the resource constraint problem in MANETs. This paper proposes Secured Hierarchical Anonymous Routing Protocol (SHARP) based on cluster routing. SHARP offers anonymity to source, destination, and routes. Theoretically SHARP achieves better anonymity protection compared to other anonymous routing protocols.