Optimize and Secure Routing Protocol for Multi-hop Wireless Network

Multi-hop Wireless Network (MWN) requires the existing of wireless nodes that communicate via a wireless channel. Thus, selecting optimal paths between the communicant nodes is a major challenge. Many researchers are focusing on this topic and proposed some routing protocols that help the nodes to learn multi-hop paths. Multi-hop wireless network is used for several types of applications, like military, medical care and national security. These applications are important and critical, so they require a certain level of performance and security during data communication. Securing the transmission of data in a multi-hop network is a challenge since the devices have limited resources like memory and battery. In this paper, we propose an optimal and secure routing protocol. The main goal of this proposal is to improve the performance and the security of such network by selecting a secure route between the source and its target destination. To secure data transmission phase, we propose to create a key shared between the source and the destination. Since the devices have limited energy, we propose to take into consideration the energy of the intermediate nodes of the selected route. Extensive simulations are performed using the Network Simulator (NS2) to validate the proposed protocol. This proposal is compared with the secured Ad-Hoc On-demand Distance Vector (SAODV) in terms of end-to-end delay, overhead and number of compromised devices.