Securing Geographic Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

We consider the security of geographic routing (GR) that is widely used in ad hoc and wireless sensor networks due to its scalability. In GR, a node greedily forwards a packet to the neighbor that is closest to the destination. Thus, GR only requires a node to maintain the location information of its one hop neighbors. However, very little work has been done to secure GR. In a potential attack, malicious nodes may falsify their location information. Also, a malicious node can send an excessive number of packets to overload the receiving nodes and block legitimate packets from other sources. Alternatively, it can drop or misdirect received packets. To shed light on these problems, we propose an approach for robust GR via rate control, packet scheduling , and trust-based multi-path routing. In a simulation study, we also show that our robust GR can circumvent and route against attacks.