A collaborative firewall for wireless ad-hoc social networks

A collaborative firewall can be realized in a multi-hop distributed wireless network when all or some of the nodes in the network agree on a filtering policy and enforce it when routing a packet. Cooperative firewalling introduces many challenges, how to distribute the rules, how to enforce them, how to reduce the global rule-set in order to limit the impact on the network performance. This paper studies the performance of a collaborative firewall when only a subset of the nodes of the ad-hoc network filter the packets. In order to achieve higher performances the integration with OLSR protocol is proposed. Simulations on realistic scenarios are performed and the source code of the simulator is released.