MOSAR: A Secured On-demand Routing Protocol for Mobile Multilevel Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, we propose a routing scheme, called MOSAR, which is able to handle the security classification of packets during the route discovery and route maintenance. The scheme should provide the network reasonable balances between security, performance and computation power efficiency. For above purposes, a new field called Route Security Requirement is added in the routing header as the indicator of security requirement. Therefore, routing is about to find the path from source to destination that all the nodes on which meet the security requirement. Besides, to protect routing packets against unauthorized disclosure, modification or eavesdropping, the protocol offers different cryptographic mechanisms that are scalable to the computation resources at each Trust level for authentication and integrity check, and if necessary, packet secrecy. Our goal is to design a dependable and affordable routing protocol for ad hoc networks where the security requirements are different for different information to transmit, under different circumstances, or with different available resources. Through the simulations, we can conclude that MOSAR functions well in handling classification and it can perform better than the regular AODV protocol.