Private logical neighborhoods for wireless ad hoc networks

In wired networks routers are aware of all other routers to which they are directly connected. In contrast, in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) a mobile router (node) will not be aware of all nodes within its transmission range. While many MANET routing protocols have been proposed in the literature, only few of them mandate proactive neighborhood discovery protocols like the Internet message encapsulation protocol (IMEP), for identifying all neighbors within a reliable delivery neighborhood (RDN). We argue why it is especially important for secure routing protocols, which have the additional constraint of the need to "live with" non cooperative nodes, to go beyond simply mandating an RDN, by mandating a private logical neighborhood (PLN).