Energy Optimization in MANET using Modified P-Coding scheme

Energy saving is an important issue in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). Recent studies show that network coding can help reduce the energy consumption in MANETs by using less transmission. However, apart from transmission cost, there are other sources of energy consumption, e.g., data encryption/decryption. In this project, the network coding is done to reduce the energy consumed by data encryption in MANETs. It is interesting that network coding has a nice property of intrinsic security, based on which encryption can be done quite efficiently. Hence, P-Coding, a lightweight encryption scheme is proposed to provide confidentiality for network-coded MANETs in an energy-efficient way. The basic idea of P-Coding is to let the source randomly permutes the symbols of each packet (which is prefixed with its coding vector), before performing network coding operations. Without knowing the permutation, eavesdroppers cannot locate coding vectors for correct decoding, and thus cannot obtain any meaningful information. It is demonstrated that due to its lightweight nature, P-Coding incurs minimal energy consumption compared to other encryption schemes.