Secure Ad-hoc Routing Through A-codes

Wireless ad-hoc networks are very attractive in several application domains, but the very nature of these networks and their cost objectives pose big security challenges, perhaps making them the most difficult net- working environments to secure. A particular challenging issue is that of secure routing. In this work we propose to get secure routing for such networks through a special coding technique at the physical layer of radio communication channels. This approach has the main advantage of being applicable to any routing pro- tocol, without requiring modifications to the protocol itself, but with a suitable key management. We illustrate it for the concrete case of AODV, the standard routing protocol for Low-data-Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (LR-WPANs). The resulting analysis seems to indicate that such approach is very promising for LR-WPANs, both in term of performance and energy efficiency.