A multipath routing strategy to prevent flooding disruption attacks in link state routing protocols for MANETs

Multipath routing has been proposed to increase resilience against network failures or improve security in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). The Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol has been adopted by several multipath routing strategies. They implement Multipoint Relay (MPR) nodes as a flooding mechanism for distributing control information. Ideally, the construction of multiple disjoint paths helps to increase resilience against network failures or malicious attacks. However, this is not always possible. In OLSR networks, partial link-state information is generated and flooded exclusively by the MPRs. Therefore, the nodes only obtain a partial view of the network topology. Additionally, flooding disruption attacks may affect either the selection of the MPRs or the propagation of control traffic information. As a consequence, the chances of constructing multiple disjoint paths are reduced. We present a strategy to compute multiple strictly disjoint paths between any two nodes in OLSR-based networks. We provide mechanisms to improve the view of the network topology by the nodes, as well as handling potential flooding disruption attacks to the multipath construction mechanism in OLSR-based networks. We conduct simulations that confirm our claims.