Research On DYMO Routing Protocol Of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

MANET, also known as Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, is different from the traditional infrastructure-based network. Without a central node, each node could serve as a router, making characters including self-organizing, multi-hop, dynamic topology and invulnerability possible for MANET. The development of various mobile terminators incurs ever-growing requirements on instant communication. Ad Hoc network are playing more and more important roles in cases that wired networks are unavailable, such as military communication, rescue from disaster, or it is costly to construct a wired networks, such as a temporary meeting.Given that each node has to maintain its own routing table and deliver data package, mobile Ad Hoc network routing protocol is operated in a more complicated environment than traditional networks and thus should be designed in a different way from the traditional ones. Also, the fact that MANET is mainly used for military communication and business conferences means high security requirements; the limited power of mobile Ad Hoc network terminators, mostly portable equipments, requires that the implication of routing protocol should be simple and inexpensive.To design a secure routing protocol, it is necessary to ascertain all potential threats, system weak points and attacks before choosing appropriate technology under the principle that security should be listed as top priority and performance the second. A MANET group was started by IETF to standardize mobile Ad Hoc network, whose focus is on the research of routing protocol, particularly DYMO routing protocol. Having been absorbing merits from AODV and DSR, DYMO routing protocol has been making progress in performance and practice, and has been defined as the standard of demand-based routing protocol. But it fails to pay enough attention to security and therefore cannot be used in situations with high security requirements.Aiming at the present types of adverse attack, this paper firstly points out the security goals of Ad Hoc network routing protocol, and analyzes several secure routing protocol. Then, with the help of Hash chain and digital signature technology, it modified its security on the basis of DYMO routing protocol so that it could fulfill our security goals. Finally, the routing protocol is completed by coding under Linux system. The introduction of digital signature technology enhanced the routing protocol's security but sacrificed efficiency and performance, because the intermediate nodes have to initiate their own signatures and simultaneously verify others' signatures. So, researches on cheaper authentication are still necessary.