Implementation of a personal area network for secure routing in MANETs by using low-cost hardware

Presently, mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are being used extensively in the defense, private, domestic, etc. fields and each of these emulates a personal area network (PAN). A MANET does not require any infrastructure; moreover, it can behave as a mobile network. These features have boosted the popularity of MANETs in the community. As more and more fields become dependent on MANETs, the system needs to be more energy aware and low cost. To commercialize MANETs, the routing protocols need to be lightweight, secure, and energy efficient, and the hardware on which it is to be implemented should be low cost at the same time. In this paper, we have proposed a lightweight, energy aware, secure routing model for MANETs, which has been implemented on low-cost hardware. Our model uses fidelity to allocate trust to a neighbor, thereby taking the decision whether to send data via that secure neighbor or not. It also uses packets like Report and Recommendation that help the protocol to detect and eliminate the malicious nodes from the network. To make the protocol energy aware we have formulated new battery thresholds, so that the battery can be monitored and losses can be minimized. To observe the results we implement this protocol in hardware, on the Arduino platform, which is a scalable, reliable, cheap, and open source. We observe that our protocol exhibits high packet delivery fraction, low normalize routing load, and low end to end delay, compared to existing secure routing protocols.