Density-based multipath secure communication over mobile ad hoc networks

Security is a critical issue in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), where mobile nodes communicate with each other over relatively unreliable wireless links with no fixed infrastructure. One example of this occurs on battle fields, where soldiers often wear cameras and wireless mobile devices to send or receive images/video of different angles or locations in order to obtain better observation of the area. Such an environment could be highly insecure since an enemy could place devices to eavesdrop on or compromise the soldier nodes. In this paper, we consider a case where time sensitive multimedia is sent using multiple paths which can make better use of load balancing strategies, increase bandwidth and save node energy. However, an enemy node could listen in on more than one path at the same time, allowing it to collect sufficient shares of an image or video frame to recover the image. Our proposed algorithm is based on a quantitative analysis of security to protect against such multi-path eavesdropping. We prove that our algorithm can achieve better level of security by detouring traffic via paths without or with less vulnerable areas at the same amount of redundancy. On the other hand, we also prove, using simulation results and mathematical derivation, our algorithm can provide much more redundancy for better multimedia quality purpose while at the same time guaranteeing the same level of security.