Secured Routing with Authentication in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes that dynamically forms a temporary network without any fixed infrastructure. Each node participates in the ad hoc routing protocol that helps it to discover multi-hop paths through the network to any node. Security challenges have become a primary concern for these networks due to their characteristics such as open medium, dynamic topology, distributed collaboration and other various constraints like battery power and low bandwidth. An Authentication mechanism is certainly needed to prevent the various possible attacks by any malicious node. In this study, we propose an efficient authentication protocol, named CAODV for a MANET with the aid of cryptographic certificates. We implemented this CAODV protocol using the network simulator NS-2 and the simulation results reveal that this mechanism is highly effective even in the presence of large number of malicious nodes. Despite a considerable increase in the routing overhead, it is minimal and outweighed by the increased security services provided by our proposed CAODV protocol for MANET.