Enhancing the security of quality of service-oriented distributed routing protocol for hybrid wireless network

Abstract

Merging the wireless infrastructure network with the wireless mobile ad-hoc networks constitutes hybrid wireless networks (HWNs). Quality of service (QoS) demands are available with the help of HWNs. However, these networks are subjected to many types of attacks because of their open wireless medium. To enhance the security of HWNs, it is necessary to provide secure routing protocols. Several routing protocols have been proposed for HWNs, one of them is the quality of service-oriented distributed (QOD) routing protocol. In this paper, two security mechanisms have been proposed for the QOD protocol. The first mechanism is used to protect transmitted data in the network using asymmetric and symmetric cryptography. The second mechanism has been proposed to enhance the security of the QOD routing protocol using keyed hash message authentication code (HMAC). The second security mechanism assumed that there is a secret key shared between each pair of neighbor nodes. Also, asymmetric cryptography is used to exchange the secret key. The secret key is used to include the message authentication code (MAC) for each message exchanged between the neighbor nodes. A network simulator NS2 is used to simulate our proposed schemes.