A secure and energy-efficient stochastic multipath routing for self-organized mobile ad hoc networks

A wireless mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is an autonomous system of mobile nodes connected by wireless links. MANET is infrastructureless and dynamic in nature. As the nodes have limited battery power and communicate through shared wireless channel, it is hard to design a secure and energy efficient routing protocol in a MANET. In this paper, we propose a secure and energy-efficient stochastic multipath routing protocol based on a Markov chain for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). The proposed routing protocol computes multiple paths between source– destination pairs and selects an energy-efficient path stochastically from those paths to forward the data packets. In addition, this protocol also secures data flow in the network as the packets are forwarded through random paths from the source node to the destination node. The random data flow paths make it difficult to jam, intercept, and hijack data packets as this will require the attacker to listen to all possible paths from the source to the destination. The performance analysis and numerical results show that our proposed protocol achieves significant performance gains in terms of energy consumption, delay, throughput, and security of routing protocols. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.