Mobile agent based clustering and maintenance using secure routing protocol for mobile ad hoc network

Routing in mobile ad hoc network is the challenging task due to the dynamic nature and resource limitations of network. Network clustering deals with partitioning network into clusters based on some rules. Clustering guarantees limited resource utilization and network scalability. In this paper, we mainly focused on using mobile agents for collecting information about cluster members and cluster maintenance. Ensuring security of mobile agent is a difficult task. In this work, the authorization of mobile agent is achieved using session key or secret key shared between mobile agent owner and node. We applied a distributed private key generation scheme, which generates secret key of cluster members based on ‘n’ key shares. The session key is generated based on past frequent traffic pattern that exist between the nodes. The behavior of mobile agent with respect to various security issues such as replay attack, non repudiation, denial of service and unauthorized access was discussed. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated under presence of varying number of malicious nodes. According to the observed results, the proposed protocol guarantees high packet delivery ratio and low delay, compared to cluster based routing protocol.   Key words: Cluster, mobile agent, distributed key generation, mobile ad hoc network, security.