Secure Routing in Multihop Wireless Ad-hoc Networks with Decode-and-Forward Relaying

Abstract: In this paper, we study the problem of secure routing in a multihop wireless ad-hoc network in the presence of randomly distributed eavesdroppers. Specifically, the locations of the eavesdroppers are modeled as a homogeneous Poisson point process (PPP) and the source-destination pair is assisted by intermediate relays using the decode-and-forward (DF) strategy. We analytically characterize the physical layer security performance of any chosen multihop path using the end-to-end secure connection probability (SCP) for both colluding and non-colluding eavesdroppers. To facilitate finding an efficient solution to secure routing, we derive accurate approximations of the SCP. Based on the SCP approximations, we study the secure routing problem which is defined as finding the multihop path having the highest SCP. A revised Bellman-Ford algorithm is adopted to find the optimal path in a distributed manner. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed secure routing scheme achieves nearly the same performance as exhaustive search.