Investigation of a bio-inspired security mechanism in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

In Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs), characteristics such as increased complexity with large scaled network, dynamic topology, absence of infrastructure and centralized control and need for survivability and unpredicted failures pose significant challenges to these environments. The presence of unpredictable behavior in mobile ad hoc environment makes the security provision a very challenging task. Therefore, self-organizing and self-healing algorithms are appropriate for these autonomous operation environments. Recently there has been an increasing interest in bio-inspired algorithms, like Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), in developing and designing communication systems. These algorithms borrow the laws from the nature by mimicking natural biological behaviors. In this work, we consider the dynamic nature of ad hoc networks in terms of nodes´ behavior and nodes´ speed with regards to the network size. We investigate the performance of a proposed autonomous bio-inspired public key management, against these parameters.