LSRP: A Lightweight Secure Routing Protocol with low cost for ad-hoc networks

Ad-hoc networks consist of only mobile nodes and have no support infrastructure. Due to the limited resources and frequent changes in topologies, ad-hoc network should consider these features for the provision of security. We present a lightweight secure routing protocol (LSRP) applicable for mobile ad-hoc networks. Since the LSRP uses an identity-based signcryption scheme, it can eliminate public or private key exchange, and can give savings in computation cost and communication overhead. LSRP is more computationally efficient than other RSA-based protocols because our protocol is based on the properties of pairings on elliptic curves. Empirical studies are conducted using NS-2 to evaluate the effectiveness of LSRP. The simulation results show that the LSRP is more efficient in terms of cost and overhead.