A Trusted Routing Based Service Discovery Protocol with Backup Nodes in MANETs

The wireless MANET is particularly vulnerable on account of its intrinsic characteristics of open medium, dynamic topology, absence of central authorities, distributed cooperation and constrained capability. These vulnerabilities create significant challenges for routing protocols operating in the entire network. They have inspired lot of research interests regarding node connectivity in MANETs, but very few measures exist to trust-integrated cooperation for service discovery. In this paper, we employ cross-layer approaches to propose a new trusted routing based service discovery protocol called TRSDP. The TRSDP is a kind of a reactive routing protocol, improved on the Dynamic Source Routing. Moreover, a backup node mechanism for quick reconnection during link failures is provided in TRSDP in order to cope with the dynamism of such networks. Case studies involving security and service discovery scenarios were presented to demonstrate how the proposed protocol works. As a result, this paper gives a solution for the trusted and efficient cooperation of routing and service discovery in MANETs.