Investigating the Performance of the TSS Scheme in Noisy MANETs

Abstract

A Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) suffers from high packet-loss due to various transmission impairments, such as: wireless signal attenuation, free space loss, thermal noise, atmospheric absorption, multipath effect, and refraction. All of these impairments are represented by a generic name, noise, and therefore such a network is referred to as a noisy network. For modeling and simulation purposes, the noisy environment is described by introducing a probability function, namely, the probability of reception (pc), which is defined as the probability that transmitted data is successfully delivered to its destination despite the presence of noise. This chapter describes the implementation and investigates the performance of the Threshold Secret Sharing (TSS) node authentication scheme in noisy MANETs. A number of simulations are performed using the MANET Simulator (MANSim) to estimate the authentication success ratio for various threshold secret shares, number of nodes, node speeds, and noise-levels. Simulation results demonstrate that, for a certain threshold secret share, the presence of noise inflicts a significant reduction in the authentication success ratio, while node mobility inflicts no or an insignificant effect. The outcomes of these simulations are important to facilitate efficient network management.