A New Multipath Routing Approach to Enhancing TCP Security in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Abstract — In a typical mobile ad hoc network, mobile computing devices wander autonomously and communicate via temporary links in a self-organized computing system without any central administrator or infrastructure support. To support truly ad hoc impromptu communication among such uncoordinated devices, a data multipath routing algorithm can be used because there is no need to rely on a centralized encryption facility (e.g., a PKI server) or complicated distributed keying protocols. In this paper, we propose a data multipath routing algorithm called Multipath TCP Security (MTS) to enhance the data security. In MTS, the source node adaptively chooses the available routes rather than exhaustively testing the “stored routes” one by one. Simulation results show that our algorithm provides a reasonably good level of security and performance. Index Terms — TCP, wireless security, ad hoc networks, multipath routing, interception rates. I