Secure and Efficient Collaborative Load Balancing for Cluster-based MANETs

Abstract

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are becoming increasingly common, and typical network loads considered for MANETs are increasing as applications evolve. Coordinated channel access protocols have been shown to be well suited for highly loaded MANETs under uniform load distributions. However, these protocols are in general not as well suited for non-uniform load distributions as uncoordinated channel access protocols due to the lack of ondemand dynamic channel allocation mechanisms that exist in infrastructure based coordinated protocols. In this paper, we present a lightweight dynamic channel allocation mechanism and a cooperative load balancing strategy that are applicable to cluster based MANETs to address this problem. We present protocols that utilize these mechanisms to improve performance in terms of throughput, energy consumption and inter-packet delay variation. A secure data transmission for cluster-based WSNs, where the clusters are formed dynamically and periodically. We propose two secure and efficient data transmission (SET) protocols for CWSNs, called SET-IBS and SET-IBOOS, by using the identity-based digital signature (IBS) scheme and the identity-based online/ offline digital signature (IBOOS) scheme, respectively. In SET-IBS, security relies on the hardness of the Diffie-Hellman problem in the pairing domain. SET-IBOOS further reduces the computational overhead for protocol security, which is crucial for WSNs, while its security relies on the hardness of the discrete logarithm problem. We show the feasibility of the SET-IBS and SET-IBOOS protocols with respect to the security requirements and security analysis against various