A Trust-based Routing Protocol for ad hoc networks

Abstract

Ad hoc networks are particularly vulnerable as compare to traditional networks mainly due to their lack of infrastructure. A malicious node can easily disrupt both the routing discovery phase and the data forwarding phase of a routing protocol if it is not secured enough. This paper proposes a new secure reactive routing protocol named TRP (Trust-based Routing Protocol) that relies on a distributed trust model managing trust levels. The model provides an estimation of trust level to each route to help a source node to chose the most secure one. Our security mechanism is protected and does not affect significantly the network performance. © 2005 by International Federation for Information Processing.