Reliable Communications over Multihop Networks under Routing Attacks

This paper considers reliable multihop transmission under routing attacks, where a malicious relay can modify or drop a packet as it is being forwarded to the destination. We propose a transmission scheme that detects malicious nodes launching routing attacks through incorporating diversity over multi-layer relays, where each relay can establish a direct connection with relays at preceding and succeeding hop levels. We prove that the proposed approach can efficiently detect malicious nodes, provided that there is at least one honest relay at each hop level. We highlight the trade-off between network efficiency and security, and show the impact of the diversity level and the number of hops on the network performance through theoretical analysis and simulation examples. Our results provide insights on general network architecture development and topology design.