Efficient Hybrid Scheme for Cluster Head Election in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Achieving reliable routing is the primary concern in the Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) due to dynamic topology and lack of centralized coordination. Among all protocols, the Cluster Based Routing Protocol (CBRP) is proved as an energy efficient routing protocol. In CBRP, selecting a suitable Cluster Head (CH) leads to enhanced network life time. Electing CH by considering security is one of the challenging tasks in CBRP. If elected node is malicious then attack such as routing disruption leads to data transmission failure. In order to avoid such attacks, a trustable node needs to be elected as CH for reliable routing. Existing CH election algorithms consider either trust or weight of the node as a factor to elect CH. Hence this paper proposes a Stable Trust-based Clustering Algorithm (STCA) in which both trust and weight of the node are considered for CH election. The proposed STCA allows only trustable nodes for weight calculation. This reduces computation cost in CH election. The proposed algorithm is simulated in NS3 and found to give better results in terms of number of clusters formed and lifetime of the CH.