Analysis of Key Distribution in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks Based on Message Relaying

Due to the insecure nature of the wireless media, the dynamically changing topology and lack of infrastructure, security in mobile ad hoc networks is hard to achieve. In this paper we present an analysis of a message-relaying based key distribution scheme for mobile ad hoc networks that was previously proposed by van der Merwe et al. Considering the message overhead occurring at the MAC layer in addition to the message overhead occurring at the network layer is an important issue in order to get a comprehensive study of the impact of the scheme on both layers. The scalability of the scheme is evaluated by investigating its performance on a network as large as 100 nodes. The analysis was performed using two scenarios: the first scenario is 50 nodes in 1000 m times 1000 m area and the second one is 100 nodes in 2000 m times 2000 m area. The simulation results show that the scheme´s communication and computational overhead has negligible impact on the network layer but had a significant impact on the MAC layer by adding a considerable value of MAC overhead.