Anonymous and secure on-demand routing protocol for multi-hop cellular networks

In single cellular networks, the mobile stations cannot communicate directly with each other. All communications are relayed through the base stations. Such topology suffers from many limitations such as the congestion problem when a large number of users are communicating in the same time to a base station. In this context, the device-to-device communications have been proposed to overcome the limitations of the conventional cellular architecture. Indeed, a mobile station can allow two nearby stations to communicate with each other without involving a base station. However, security becomes an important challenge that must be taken into consideration as the mobile stations participate in routing data between each other. For that reason, we propose in this paper a secure routing protocol for Multi-hop Cellular Networks (MCNs). Our goal is to discover a secure and short route between the source and the destination. To evaluate this proposed protocol, we perform some simulations based on Network Simulator (NS-2) and crypto++ library. The simulation results show that it provides acceptable performance in terms of throughput and routing overhead as comparing with SAODV.