TY - JOUR
T1 - On the price of security in large-scale wireless ad hoc networks
AU - Zhang, Chi
AU - Song, Yang
AU - Fang, Yuguang
AU - Zhang, Yanchao
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received January 06, 2009; revised November 24, 2009 and March 08, 2010; accepted May 05, 2010; approved by IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORKING Editor D. Agrawal. Date of publication February 04, 2011; date of current version April 15, 2011. This work was supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grants CNS-0916391, CNS-0721744, and CNS-0716450. The work of Y. Fang was supported in part by the National Science Foundation of China under Grant 61003300, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant JY10000901021, and the China 111 Project under Grant B08038 with Xidian University, Xi’an, China. The work of Y. Zhang was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grants CNS-0716302 and CNS-0844972 (the CAREER Award).
PY - 2011/4
Y1 - 2011/4
N2 - Security always comes with a price in terms of performance degradation, which should be carefully quantified. This is especially the case for wireless ad hoc networks (WANETs), which offer communications over a shared wireless channel without any preexisting infrastructure. Forming end-to-end secure paths in such WANETs is more challenging than in conventional networks due to the lack of central authorities, and its impact on network performance is largely untouched in the literature. In this paper, based on a general random network model, the asymptotic behaviors of secure throughput and delay with the common transmission range rn and the probability pf of neighboring nodes having a primary security association are quantified when the network size n is sufficiently large. The costs and benefits of secure-link-augmentation operations on the secure throughput and delay are also analyzed. In general, security has a cost: Since we require all the communications operate on secure links, there is a degradation in the network performance when pf<1. However, one important exception is that when pf is Ω(1/log n), the secure throughput remains at the Gupta and Kumar bound of Θ(1/√n log n) packets/time slot, wherein no security requirements are enforced on WANETs. This implies that even when the pf goes to zero as the network size becomes arbitrarily large, it is still possible to build throughput-order-optimal secure WANETs, which is of practical interest since pf is very small in many practical large-scale WANETs.
AB - Security always comes with a price in terms of performance degradation, which should be carefully quantified. This is especially the case for wireless ad hoc networks (WANETs), which offer communications over a shared wireless channel without any preexisting infrastructure. Forming end-to-end secure paths in such WANETs is more challenging than in conventional networks due to the lack of central authorities, and its impact on network performance is largely untouched in the literature. In this paper, based on a general random network model, the asymptotic behaviors of secure throughput and delay with the common transmission range rn and the probability pf of neighboring nodes having a primary security association are quantified when the network size n is sufficiently large. The costs and benefits of secure-link-augmentation operations on the secure throughput and delay are also analyzed. In general, security has a cost: Since we require all the communications operate on secure links, there is a degradation in the network performance when pf<1. However, one important exception is that when pf is Ω(1/log n), the secure throughput remains at the Gupta and Kumar bound of Θ(1/√n log n) packets/time slot, wherein no security requirements are enforced on WANETs. This implies that even when the pf goes to zero as the network size becomes arbitrarily large, it is still possible to build throughput-order-optimal secure WANETs, which is of practical interest since pf is very small in many practical large-scale WANETs.
KW - Ad hoc networks
KW - network performance
KW - network security
KW - wireless networks
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U2 - 10.1109/TNET.2011.2106162
DO - 10.1109/TNET.2011.2106162
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:79955482990
SN - 1063-6692
VL - 19
SP - 319
EP - 332
JO - IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
JF - IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
IS - 2
M1 - 5710020
ER -