A New Approach to Coding in Content Based MANETs

TL;DR

This paper explores a new coding approach in content-based MANETs that leverages caching to enable pollution attack protection while maintaining robustness, comparing various coding strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a cache-based coding method that allows mixing at all sources, providing pollution protection without sacrificing robustness, unlike traditional source-restricted coding.

Findings

Full cache coding is competitive with unrestricted coding.

Full cache coding offers complete protection against pollution attacks.

Restricted coding at the source reduces robustness.

Abstract

In content-based mobile ad hoc networks (CB-MANETs), random linear network coding (NC) can be used to reliably disseminate large files under intermittent connectivity. Conventional NC involves random unrestricted coding at intermediate nodes. This however is vulnerable to pollution attacks. To avoid attacks, a brute force approach is to restrict the mixing at the source. However, source restricted NC generally reduces the robustness of the code in the face of errors, losses and mobility induced intermittence. CB-MANETs introduce a new option. Caching is common in CB MANETs and a fully reassembled cached file can be viewed as a new source. Thus, NC packets can be mixed at all sources (including the originator and the intermediate caches) yet still providing protection from pollution. The hypothesis we wish to test in this paper is whether in CB-MANETs with sufficient caches of a file, the performance (in terms of robustness) of the restricted coding equals that of unrestricted coding. In this paper, we examine and compare unrestricted coding to full cache coding, source only coding, and no coding. As expected, we find that full cache coding remains competitive with unrestricted coding while maintaining full protection against pollution attacks.