EARP: Energy-aware Anonymous Routing protocol in MANETs

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks use anonymous routing protocols that hide node identities and/or routes from outside observers in order to provide anonymity protection. However, prevailing anonymous routing protocols depend on either hop-by-hop encryption or redundant traffic either produces high cost or cannot offer full anonymity protection to routes, destinations, and data sources. The high cost anonymous routing protocol exacerbates the inherent resource constraint problem in MANETs especially in multimedia wireless applications. To provide high anonymity protection at a low cost, we propose Energy-aware Anonymous Routing protocol (EARP). EARP dynamically partitions the network area into zones and randomly chooses nodes in zones as intermediate Relay Nodes (RN), which form a non-predictable anonymous route. EARP offers anonymity protection to sources, destinations, and routes. In addition, it hides the data receiver/ initiators among many receivers/ initiators to strengthen source and destination anonymity protection. EARP uses Energy-aware Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing protocol (E-GPSR). It also has strategies to effectively counter timing and sybil attack. EARP achieves comparable routing efficiency to the GPSR geographical routing protocol.