Trust and Neighbor Coverage Based Protocol to Improve Reliability of Routing in MANET

Mobile Ad Hoc network works in hostile environment in absence of central control. Malicious or low energy nodes may degrade performance and also affects lifetime of the network. Broadcasting method which is commonly used for maintaining connectivity causes high overhead on the network. So it is necessary to exclude malicious and low energy nodes from the network and reduce the overhead. The proposed Trust and neighbor coverage based protocol (TNCP) will allow nodes to rebroadcast the RREQ packet only if their cumulative trust and remaining energy fall above certain threshold. The rebroadcast order is formed by trustworthiness factor (TF) to minimize routing overhead. The trustworthiness factor is calculated on the basis of cumulative trust, remaining energy and neighbors covered. An energy efficient and most trusted path is selected still in the presence of low energy or malicious nodes.