ARMR: Anonymous routing protocol with multiple routes for communications in mobile ad hoc networks

A mobile ad hoc network consists of mobile nodes that communicate in an open wireless medium. Adversaries can launch analysis against the routing information embedded in the routing message and data packets to detect the traffic pattern of the communications, thereby obtaining sensitive information of the system, such as the identity of a critical node. In order to thwart such attacks, anonymous routing protocols are developed. For the purposes of security and robustness, an ideal anonymous routing protocol should hide the identities of the nodes in the route, in particular, those of the source and the destination. Multiple routes should be established to increase the difficulty of traffic analysis and to avoid broken paths due to node mobility. Existing schemes either make the unrealistic and undesired assumption that certain topological information about the network is known to the nodes, or cannot achieve all the properties described in the above. In this paper, we propose an anonymous routing protocol with multiple routes called ARMR, which can satisfy all the required properties. In addition, the protocol has the flexibility of creating fake routes to confuse the adversaries, thus increasing the level of anonymity. In terms of communication efficiency, extensive simulation is carried out. Compared with AODV and MASK, our ARMR protocol gives a higher route request success rate under all situations and the delay of our protocol is comparable to the best of these two protocols. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.