A joint performance-vulnerability metric framework for designing ad hoc routing protocols

When a network is deployed in a hostile environment, different paths between nodes may provide varying levels of resilience to adversarial attack. Therefore, in order to ensure that network services are both timely and secure, both the vulnerability and performance of the path must be taken into account during route selection. However, current routing protocols do not take resilience of intermediate links into account, instead focusing on optimizing use of network resources. In this work, we propose a new class of resilience-enhanced routing protocols that incorporate the security of individual communication links when selecting a routing path. To enable resilient path selection, we introduce a joint performance-vulnerability metric, which quantifies the cost of a link based on both performance and vulnerability characteristics, so that shortest paths chosen using this metric will be both efficient and resilient to attack. We give an example that measures resilience to key exposure in ad hoc networks and demonstrate the feasibility of our scheme through analysis and simulation.