Overlay tunneling as a policy tool for defending mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

AbstractMobile ad hoc networks face many challenges when they are deployed, particularly problems associated with security and network failures arising from the dynamics of their network topologies. To address these issues, there have been many efforts to introduce security into the actual network protocols, most of which unfortunately struggle with the trade‐off between security and network overhead. Consequently, it is often desirable to have a lightweight approach to introduce security and robustness, where one employs conventional and well‐understood network protocols, and attempts to achieve the assurability of the network through higher‐layer, overlay mechanisms. This paper explores a lightweight overlay tunneling scheme operating at the Internet protocol layer as a policy tool that can mitigate network failures and attacks directed at the network without involving the redesign of the underlying routing protocols. Moreover, two optimizations are proposed that lead to improved performance when additional information is available. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.