Forming the COUNCIL Based Clusters in Securing Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel COUNCIL-based clustering method for wireless Ad Hoc networks, enhancing security and fault tolerance by replacing single cluster heads with a group using threshold secret sharing.

Contribution

It proposes an adaptive distributed threshold scheme and a graph theory-based algorithm for forming COUNCIL clusters, improving security and resilience over traditional methods.

Findings

COUNCIL clusters improve network security against compromised nodes.

The adaptive threshold scheme enhances fault tolerance.

Graph theory-based algorithm efficiently forms secure clusters.

Abstract

In cluster-based routing protocol (CBRP), two-level hierarchical structure is successfully used to reduce over-flooding in wireless Ad Hoc networks. As it is vulnerable to a single point of failure, we propose a new adaptive distributed threshold scheme to replace the cluster head by a group of cluster heads within each cluster, called COUNCIL, and distribute the service of single cluster head to multiple cluster heads using (k,n) threshold secret sharing scheme. An Ad Hoc network formed by COUNCIL based clusters can work correctly when the number of compromised cluster heads is smaller than k. To implement this adaptive threshold scheme in wireless Ad Hoc Networks, membership of the clusters should be defined in an adaptive way. In this paper, we mainly discuss our algorithm for forming COUNCIL based clusters using the concept of dominating set from graph theory.