Verification and Validation of Trust-Based Opportunistic Routing Protocol

Data routing is an essential operation in working of a MANET. Many researchers have proposed novel routing protocols for MANET. Working of the routing protocols differs with each other. Each routing protocol follows a set of rules and has different characteristics. Various network simulators are popularly used to test performance and working of the novel routing protocols. However, there is a need to formally verify working of any novel routing protocol and to statistically validate experimental results collected from simulation. Our last research contribution proposed a novel trust-based opportunistic routing protocol, viz. ORPSN. This paper presents formal verification of ORPSN protocol using analytical proofs. The paper gives analytical proofs about optimality of the algorithm and loop freedom. The paper uses t-test to validate experimental results and observations. It compares performance of ORPSN and CORMAN opportunistic routing protocols in various test conditions. After statistical validation of experimental results, it is observed that performance of ORPSN is significantly better than CORMAN.