Anonymous and Authenticated Routing in Multi-Hop Cellular Networks

Multi-hop cellular network is a promising architecture aiming to improve the performance of current cellular network. However, there are many security challenges due to the participation of the mobile nodes in the routing process. In this paper, we address two challenges: route anonymity, aiming to prevent attackers from tracking a packet flow to its source or destination; and location privacy, aiming to prevent attackers from detecting the nodes´ locations. Most of the existing solutions require much computational power and energy. We propose a routing protocol that provides anonymous communication by protecting the user´s anonymity and location privacy. The user´s anonymity is preserved for a large number of compromised nodes. Simulations results show that the proposed protocol is efficient and can be implemented with an acceptable overhead.