Trusted AODV for trustworthy routing in MANET

Abstract

A Mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is an extremely testing lively network. They are self configuring, autonomous, quickly deployable and operate without infrastructure. Mobile ad hoc networks consist of nodes that cooperate to provide connectivity and are free to move and organize randomly. Nodes can connect and depart the network at anytime and should be in position to relay traffic. These nodes are often vulnerable to failure thus making mobile ad hoc networks open to threats and attacks. Communication in MANET relies on mutual trust between the participating nodes but the features of MANET make this hard. Nodes sometimes fail to transmit and start dropping packets during the transmission. Such nodes are responsible for untrustworthy routing. A trust based scheme can be used to track this behavior of untrustworthy nodes and segregate them from routing, thus provide trustworthiness. In this paper a trust based AODV protocol is presented which assigns a trust value for each node. Nodes are allowed to participate in routing based on their trust values. A threshold value is assigned and if the nodes trust value is greater than this value its marked as trustworthy node and allowed to participate in routing else the node is marked untrustworthy. This scheme increases PDR and decreases delay thereby enhancing the trustworthiness in AODV based MANET routing. The work is implemented and simulated on NS-2. The simulation result shows the proposed protocol provides more reliable and consistent data transfer compared with general AODV in presence of unpredictable and unreliable nodes in MANET. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH.