ENERGY EFFICIENT CLUSTER BASED MULTICAST SECURITY FOR MANET : Mobile Communication

In recent years Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) have received tremendous attention because of the self-configuration and self-maintenance capabilities. In the MANET nodes can directly communicate with all the other nodes within their radio ranges; whereas nodes that not in the direct communication range use intermediate node(s) to communicate with each other. In these two situations all the nodes that have participated in the communication automatically form a wireless network therefore this kind of wireless network can be viewed as MANET. Security has become a primary concern to provide protected communication between mobile nodes in a hostile environment. Unlike wired networks the unique characteristics of MANET pose a number of non-trivial challenges to the security design. Multicast routing is extremely difficult in MANET due to its limited resources such as bandwidth and battery power. Energy management techniques are necessary to improve the performance of the routing protocol. Most of the existing protocols have assumed a MANET as a trusted environment. Unfortunately in the presence of malicious nodes a MANET is highly vulnerable to attacks due to its open environment dynamically changing topology and a lack of centralized security infrastructure.