SECURED AD-HOC ROUTING PROTOCOL FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Abstract

The wireless sensor networks are collection of large numbers of tiny sensor devices with wireless communication capabilities. The sensor devices autonomously form networks through which sensor data is transported. The sensor devices are often severely resource constrained. An on-board battery or solar panel can only supply limited amounts of power. Moreover, the small physical size and low per-device cost limit the complexity of the system. Wireless sensor network has issues compare with wired networking infrastructure. Among them range, power, processing power, memory and cost are major concerns. If, considered large nodes it is prone to failure, easy to be compromised, long term reliability cannot be considered. Due to highly increases of nodes there is a limitation. The wireless Ad-hoc network has list of challenges. For instance limited wireless transmission, routing overhead, battery constrains, Asymmetric links, time varying wireless link characteristic, broadcast nature of the wireless medium, packet losses due to transmission errors, Mobility-induced route changes, Potentially frequent network partitions and Ease of snooping on wireless transmissions (security issues). In this project, the author proposes a solution to provide security in the route discovery process of mobile ad hoc networks in terms of confidentiality, integrity and authenticity. The proposed security solution is primarily designed for battle field surveillance systems however, it can be applied to any MANET application which seeks for confidentiality, integrity and authenticity. The proposed solution is developed on top AODV; an existing MANET routing protocol by using ‘Network Simulator 2 (NS2)’ simulation environment. The author has used several case studies to perform a qualitative analysis on security achievements of the proposed solution and performed a comparison between the existing AODV protocol and the proposed solution in terms of security aspects. Furthermore, she has carried out a quantitative analysis to measure the performance of both protocols and performed a comparison between both protocols in terms of network performance. The proposed solution has been succeeded in achieving its goal as a routing protocol which provides confidentiality, integrity and authentication in route discovery process. It can be used as a foundation to build a more secure and scalable routing protocol by improving and adding new features.