Abstract

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a spontaneous network that can be established with no fixed infrastructure. This means that all its nodes behave as routers and take part in its discovery and maintenance of routes to other nodes in the network. Its routing protocol has to be able to cope with the new challenges that a MANET creates such as nodes mobility, security maintenance, quality of service, limited bandwidth and limited power supply. These challenges set new demands on MANET routing protocols. With the increasing interest in MANETs, there has been a greater focus on the subject of securing such networks. Out of the many discussions and research groups discussing the different security issues in the field of mobile ad hoc networks, many papers have been written describing different proposed secure routing protocols that defend against malicious nodes' attacks that MANETs face. However, the majority of these MANET secure routing protocols did not provide a complete solution for all the MANETs' attacks and assumed that any node participating in the MANET is not selfish and that it will cooperate to support different network functionalities. Recently, researchers started to study selfish nodes and their effects on mobile ad hoc networks. That resulted in creating a new thread of research in the MANET field. A number of research papers discussing different cooperation enforcement schemes for detecting and defending against selfish nodes and their disturbance to mobile ad hoc networks were published. Still none of these proposed cooperation enforcement schemes were based on any existing MANET secure routing protocols. AlI of these proposed schemes were based on routing protocols with no security measures at all. My research strategy is to choose one of the secure routing protocols according to its security-effectiveness, study it and analyze its functionality and performance. The authenticated routing for ad hoc networks (ARAN) secure routing protocol was chosen for analysis. Then, the different existing cooperation enforcement schemes were surveyed so that to come up with a reputation-based scheme to integrate with the ARAN protocol. The result of that integration is called: Reputed-ARAN. Consequently, Reputed-ARAN is capable of handling both selfish and malicious nodes' attacks. Also, the Glomosim simulation package was chosen to carry out the experimental part of this thesis work. The results of the experiments showed that in the presence of 30% selfish nodes and with node mobility of 10 m/s, the newly proposed Reputed-ARAN protocol improves network throughput to 63.1% , from 38.8% network throughput provided by normal ARAN. This improvement is obtained at the cost of a higher overhead percentage with minimal increase in the average number of hops. The main contribution in this thesis: Reputed-ARAN proves to be more efficient and more secure than normal ARAN secure routing protocol in defending against both malicious and authenticated selfish nodes.

School

School of Sciences and Engineering

Department

Computer Science & Engineering Department

Degree Name

MS in Computer Science

Date of Award

2-1-2006

Online Submission Date

1-1-2005

First Advisor

Ahmed Sameh

Second Advisor

Sherif El Kassas

Committee Member 1

Mohy Mahmoud

Committee Member 2

Awad Khalil

Committee Member 3

Gamal Darwish

Document Type

Thesis

Extent

120 leaves

Library of Congress Subject Heading 1

Routing (Computing network management)

Library of Congress Subject Heading 2

Computer networks

Rights

The American University in Cairo grants authors of theses and dissertations a maximum embargo period of two years from the date of submission, upon request. After the embargo elapses, these documents are made available publicly. If you are the author of this thesis or dissertation, and would like to request an exceptional extension of the embargo period, please write to thesisadmin@aucegypt.edu

Call Number

Thesis 2005/61

Location

mmbk

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