On the secure optimized link state routing (SOLSR) protocol for MANETs

A plethora of routing protocols are available for effective and efficient data dissemination in MANETs. But due to broadcast nature of wireless communications, these protocols are prone to diverse security attacks. In this work, the Secure Optimized Link State Routing (SOLSR) protocol is proposed to fill the breach for security attacks while finding path(s) from source to destination by including message authentication code (MAC) value that is appended to message as a signature, followed by encryption and Global secret key in both HELLO messages and Topology control (TC) messages. Timestamp mechanism is used to avoid replay attacks because authentication and encryption cannot prevent replay attacks. This paper also presents the NS-2 simulation results to assess the SOLSR protocol and the achieved performance comparison between SOLSR and OLSR over different network scenarios. It is shown that the proposed SOLSR outperforms the OLSR in terms of the achieved security, data overhead, packet loss and delay.