Secure Cluster-Based SIP Service over Ad hoc Networks

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is the dominant protocol used for VoIP signaling. SIP is required to be adapted for use over decentralized environment instead of the overlay infrastructure-based networks. This research proposes a secure cluster-based SIP service over Ad hoc network to protect the adapted SIP service from several types of attacks. It eliminates the shortcomings of centralized approaches such as single point of failure. Additionally, it cuts off the overhead presented by fully distributed approaches. We conducted sets of simulation experiments to evaluate the proposed solution through different metrics. The advantage of using secure solution versus the non-secure solution has been studied. Secure solution overcomes the use of the non-secure one. It maintains higher call signaling success ratio than non-secure by 58% under high black hole attacker ratio. Non-secure solution, under Denial of Service (DoS) attack, suffers overhead that can reach up to 13.5 times the overhead resulted from the use of the secure solution.