Enhancing the Security of Dynamic Source Routing Protocol Using Energy Aware and Distributed Trust Mechanism in MANETs

A routing protocol for detection of malicious nodes and selection of most reliable, secure, close to shortest and trustworthy path for routing data packets in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) is introduced. Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol [1] is extended and termed as Energy Efficient Secure Dynamic Source Routing (EESDSR). The protocol is based on an efficient, power aware and distributed trust model that enhances the security of Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol. The model identifies the nodes exhibiting malicious behaviors like: gray hole, malicious topology change behavior, dropping data packets and dropping control packets. Monitoring mechanism is suitable for MANETs as it focuses on power saving, has distributed nature and adaptable to dynamic network topology. The new routing protocol is evaluated using Network Simulator 2 (NS2). Through extensive simulations, it has been proved that EESDSR protocol performs better than the standard DSR protocol.