Secrecy throughput of MANETs with malicious nodes

Abstract

The secrecy throughput of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) with malicious nodes is investigated. The MANET consists of n legitimate mobile nodes and m malicious nodes. Transmissions between legitimate nodes are subject to a delay constraint D. An information theoretic approach for security is applied to achieve secure communication among legitimate nodes in MANETs with transmissions being kept perfectly secure from malicious nodes. A critical threshold on the number of malicious nodes (m) is identified such that when m = o(radicnD), i.e., lim_nrarrinfin m/radicnD = 0, the secrecy throughput equals the throughput of MANETs without malicious nodes, i.e., the impact of the presence of malicious nodes on the network throughput is negligible; and when m = Omega (radicnDpoly(n)), i.e., lim_nrarrinfin m/(radicnDpoly(n)) ges c for a positive constant c, the secrecy throughput is limited by the number of malicious nodes.