A Unique Light Weight Time Stamp Based Distributed Security Protocol for Wireless Ad hoc Network

A wireless network is one where two or more nodes communicate with each other over a wireless medium like air. Such communications which do not require any specialized central station or base station are known as Mobile Adhoc NETwork (MANET). Security is a major concern in such networks as the wireless data are prone to more vulnerability and eavesdropping. Security in such networks is provided by MAC layer as encryption and authentication. Several encryption and authentication schemes are proposed to strengthen the security of the network. But stronger encryption technique leads to more energy loss due to nodes because of higher processing cycles and also contribute to higher delay due to longer time the packets spends in the queue. In this work a unique timestamp based network security technique is proposed. The technique minimizes the encryption packet overflow which is induced due to public key exchange, and derives the public key directly from the neighbor‘s information which is propagated through routing information exchange. The simulation is performed with omnet++ simulator and the results show that the energy overhead due to encryption or performance compromise are minimum in the proposed system. Further as the protocol is embedded in the network layer it is easily adoptable to any existing architecture without modifying the MAC or Physical layer standard or protocol.