A Countermeasure to Eavesdropping on Data Packets by Utilizing Control Packet Overhearing for Radio overlapping Reduced Multipath Routing in Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Ad hoc networks are autonomously distributed wireless networks which consist of wireless terminals (hereinafter, referred to as nodes). They do not rely on wireless network infrastructures such as base stations. Relaying nodes and their surrounding nodes are susceptible to data theft and eavesdropping because nodes communicate via radio waves. Previously, we had proposed the secure dispersed data transfer method for encryption, decryption, and transfer of the original data packets. To use the secure dispersed data transfer method securely, we had proposed using the node-disjoint multipath routing method. In this method, multiple versions of encrypted data packets are transferred along each disjoint multipath to counter data packet theft. We had also proposed the enhanced version of the aforementioned routing method to reduce radio area overlap by using rebroadcasting of control packets to counter eavesdropping attacks. In this paper, we propose a multipath routing method to reduce radio area overlap through the introduction of control packet overhearing. We introduce control packet overhearing mechanisms to eliminate excess control packet counts and latency in the pathfinding process. Our main contributions are as follows: (1) our proposed method can reduce radio area overlap without  each node's geographical location information (e.g., using GPS information); (2) our proposed method also can eliminate excess control packets and latency without degradation of the security. Furthermore we conducted simulation experiments to evaluate our proposed method. We observed that our proposed method can construct the desired paths with a smaller amount of control packets and a shorter latency in the pathfinding process. We also conducted additional experiments to discuss the applicable scope of our proposed method. As a result, we confirmed that our proposed method was more effective as the average number of adjacent nodes increased.