Collaborative trust-based shortest secure path discovery in mobile ad hoc networks

As routes in MANET are composed of only mobile terminals based on a multi-hop mechanism, MANET may encounter severe situations where intermediate nodes disturb delivering packets adversely. Accordingly, the stability of routing protocols is very important for operating the ad hoc networks efficiently and securely. However finding a secure end-to-end path is not easy, since the nodes in MANET are characterized by uncertain trust relationship each other. In this paper, a comprehensive mechanism for discovering the most secure and shortest paths, is proposed. This proposed mechanism is based on the Dijkstra algorithm, and regards distance weight and trust weight highly. The metric value which can determine the routing path is to be extracted from the distance value and the trust level. According to the simulation results, even though the communication cost increases up to about 8%, the security level of the shortest path is improved significantly.