WATCHMAN: An Overlay Distributed AAA Architecture for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Access control concerns in MANETs are very serious and considered as a crucial challenge for operators who prospects to employ unrivaled capabilities of such networks for different applications. We propose a novel hierarchical distributed AAA architecture for proactive link state routing protocols notably OLSR. This proposal contains a lightweight and secure design of an overlay authentication and authorization paradigm for mobile nodes as well as a reliable accounting system to enable operators to charge nodes based on their connection duration time. We also suggest a hierarchical distributed AAA (Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting) server architecture with resource and location aware election mechanism. Moreover, this proposal mitigates the OLSR security issues noticeably and eventually defines a node priority-based quality of service.