Trust-based co-operative routing for secure communication in mobile ad hoc networks

The working of a Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) relies on the supportive cooperation among the network nodes. But due to its intrinsic features, a misbehaving node can easily lead to a routing disorder. This paper presents two trust-based routing schemes, namely Trust-based Self-Detection Routing (TSDR) and Trust-based Cooperative Routing (TCOR) designed with an Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocol. The proposed work covers a wide range of security challenges, including malicious node identification and prevention, accurate trust quantification, secure trust data sharing, and trusted route maintenance. This brings a prominent solution for mitigating misbehaving nodes and establishing efficient communication in MANET. It is empirically validated based on a performance comparison with the current Evolutionary Self-Cooperative Trust (ESCT) scheme, Generalized Trust Model (GTM), and the conventional AODV protocol. The extensive simulations are conducted against three different varying network scenarios. The results affirm the improved values of eight popular performance metrics overcoming the existing routing schemes. Among the two proposed works, TCOR is more suitable for highly scalable networks; TSDR suits, however, the MANET application better with its small size. This work thus makes a significant contribution to the research community, in contrast to many previous works focusing solely on specific security aspects, and results in a trade-off in the expected values of evaluation parameters and asserts their efficiency.