ABSTRACT
A mobile ad hoc network is a special type of wireless network in which a collection of mobile hosts with wireless
network interfaces may form a temporary network. Without the aid of proper fixed infrastructure, providing secure
communications is a big challenge. The strength of the security solutions very much depends on the cryptographic
keys used for communication. Efficient key management is an important requirement of such networks. For networks
like MANET which are basically constrained networks with minimum resources, identification of suitable asymmetric
cryptosystem is a vital one. Hence an attempt has been made in this paper to identity a suitable asymmetric-threshold
based cryptosystems for small MANETs. The study focuses on the comparison of Rivest Shamir Adelman-Threshold
Cryptography and Elliptic Curve Cryptography Threshold Cryptography in terms of the performance parameters
like key generation time, Encryption time, Decryption time and communication cost. Different small network
scenarios with variable node sizes and key sizes are experimented and the results show that ECC-TC is the most
desirable asymmetric-threshold cryptosystem for small MANET.
Keywords: - MANET, Threshold Cryptography, Elliptic Curve Cryptography, RSA.