OSR: Optimal and Secure Routing Protocol in Multi-hop Wireless Networks

Traditional routing protocols are designed to efficiently find paths containing high-quality links under assumed trust environment. Nowadays, numerous schemes have been proposed to defend attacks with the increasing attention on security issues in the applications of multi-hop wireless networks. However, only limited works consider the routing performance while securing the routing protocols. In order to fill this gap, we design a new secure routing protocol and count its routing performance at the same time. In this paper, we propose an Optimal and Secure Routing (OSR) protocol to find optimal paths with best routing performance in terms of maximum utility value as well as resilient to active attacks. OSR protocol relies on a trust third party, Trust Clearance Center (TCC), which utilizes game theory method to calculate and assign trust value for each node according to their utility report behavior. We prove that TCC is able to detect malicious nodes and segregate them from the network when they try to launch attacks. Therefore, optimal paths can be discovered without any utility cheating. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that OSR can effectively discover optimal paths with high detection rate and low false alarm rate. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first piece of work that adopts game theory to deal with problems that jointly consider security and routing performance.