Navigation in Distance Vector Spaces and Its Use for Node Avoidance Routing

Traditional network routing uses the single (shortest) path paradigm. This paradigm exposes sessions to various attacks along this path, such as eavesdropping, DoS attacks etc. As a result, certain nodes or network regions may pose security threats and it is desired to consider node routing schemes which avoid them. The task of node avoidance routing is particularly challenging in distance-vector networks, where only shortest-distance information is available to the nodes. We address this problem by proposing a new routing paradigm in which the forwarding mechanism exploits the distance-vector information towards several nodes and utilizes it to forward network traffic on non-shortest paths routes; in particular on node-avoiding routes aiming at bypassing security-suspected nodes. We study this paradigm, propose a routing algorithm based on it and establish their properties. Extensive evaluation of the algorithm in general situations is conducted via simulation.