An Evaluation of a Security Mechanism Response Time Using a General Purpose OS for a Multi-hop Network

Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is an autonomous distributed network which is constructed only with gathered nodes on the spot. In MANET, wide area communication on wireless networks can be realized because a node relays other node´s packets by adopting a multi-hop routing protocol. Security is an indispensable issue in MANET because an unknown node may join the network easily. However, the demand for the level of authentication and its response time is different depending on the environment and applications. Thus, we focus on real-time control of the security mechanism for MANET. In this paper, we have established multi-hop communication environment and introduced methods to control secure connections by applying IPsec as an encryption scheme, on top of the general-purpose operating systems with enabled preemption for interruption. Under such conditions, we have measured response time of CPU with or without load of other applications. We have evaluated the influence of streaming as an application load and investigated on a security realization method for MANET.