Security in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: Trust Establishment for Reliable Data Packet Delivery in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), the nodes act both as traffic sources and as relays that forward packets from other nodes along multi-hop routes to the destination. Such networks are suited to situations in which a wireless infrastructure is unavailable, infeasible, or prohibitively expensive. However, the lack of a trusted infrastructure in such networks, makes secure and reliable packet delivery very challenging. A given node acting as a relay may exhibit malicious behavior with respect to packet forwarding, which disrupts packet transmission in the network. For example, a malicious node may arbitrarily choose to drop or misroute packets that are passed to it for forwarding to the next hop. This book introduces a trust establishment framework for MANETs, called Hermes, which aims to improve the reliability of packet forwarding over multi-hop routes in the presence of malicious nodes and to discourage selfish node behavior. The analysis sheds light on this new and exciting network environment, and should be especially useful to professionals in Network Security and Communication Network fields, or anyone else who is interested in learning about secure data networks.