A Low-Cost Anonymous Routing Protocol in MANETs

With the wide use of mobile devices in mobile ad hoc networks, maintaining anonymity is becoming an increasingly important issue. Existing routing algorithms either rely on hop-by-hop encryption or local broadcasting for anonymous routing, which lead to high overhead. We propose a low-cost anonymous routing algorithm, which can provide both source/destination and routing anonymity. It dynamically divides the network into hierarchical zones to obscure routing path and randomly chooses nodes as intermediate relay nodes. Therefore it splits routing path to multiple steps that contains no specific routing pattern. Furthermore, we present analysis of the ability of our algorithm to withstand certain attacks. Experiment results show that our algorithm trades some routing efficiency for anonymity, but gains better delivery rate than GPSR under short transmission range.