Towards a novel trust-based opportunistic routing protocol for wireless networks

Opportunistic routing is a promising research area in the context of wireless network communications. Security and trustworthy of routing in this field, however, needs to be considerably researched. In this paper, a novel trust establishment algorithm is proposed, designed, and implemented specifically for opportunistic routing protocols which benefits from direct interactions between wireless nodes. The proposed trust model benefits from a novel watchdog mechanism considering not only forwarding behaviour of nodes but also the quality of links between them. Furthermore, three different metrics for next hop selection is introduced enabling nodes to select their next hop forwarders more sophisticatedly using quality of links, geographical location of nodes, and their trust level. Extensive simulation results represent that proposed model can significantly improve the performance of network communications when malicious nodes try to collapse the system.