Investigations on the identification of trustbased optimum route using direct and indirect observations for mobile adhoc networks

Abstract

Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) has been the focus of recent developments in wireless communication paradigm. Nowadays, MANET becomes more important due to its applications in certain critical areas like military, disaster management, rescue operation etc. MANET is a continuously self-configuring, infrastructure-less network of mobile nodes connected wirelessly. There is no fixed infrastructure in MANET and all communicating nodes are not stationary in nature. This results in a dynamic topology. MANET has several attractive features over conventional networks, such as low cost, quick deployment and minimal configuration. MANET consists of many mobile nodes, where each node performs the role of a node as well as a router. Communication between two nodes takes place through intermediate nodes (Cho et al. 2011). MANET has various security threats which affect the packet transmission. Security has become a primary concern between mobile nodes in a hostile environment. Intriguing MANET security problem is the provision of secure routing in the presence of malicious nodes or compromised nodes.It is not an easy task to identify the compromised nodes in the normal functioning of the network. So, the packet delivery is not guaranteed when compromised nodes are presented in the network. These compromised nodes force to use poor routes (e.g., long routes), drop, misroute and corrupt the transmission of data packets. Hence, secure routing is one of the major challenges in MANET. This issue motivates to propose collaborative secure routing protocol to thwart network layer attacks in MANET. Therefore, the first protocol namely Collaborative Trust based Secure Routing protocol (CTSR) is proposed. CTSR identifies the trustworthiness nodes and compromised nodes in the network. CTSR usestwo way acknowledgement-based framework. CTSR computes trust value by using both direct and indirect observations. CTSR uses Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST) for computing indirect trust values. Proposed CTSR handles uncertainty reasoning. Proposed