An Anonymous Routing Protocol with The Local-repair Mechanism for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract — In this paper, we first define the requirements on anonymity and security properties of the routing protocol in mobile ad hoc networks, and then propose a new anonymous routing protocol with the local-repair mechanism. Detailed analysis shows that our protocol achieves both anonymity and security properties defined. A major challenge in designing anonymous routing protocols is to reduce computation and communication costs. To overcome this challenge, our protocol is design to require neither asymmetric nor symmetric encryption/decryption while updating the flooding route requests; more importantly, once a route is broken, instead of re-launching a new costly flooding route discovery process like previous work, our protocol provides a local-repair mechanism to fix broken parts of a route without compromising anonymity. I