Distributed Trust Node Selection for Secure Group Communication in MANET

The objective of the work is to improve the mechanism for selecting trust nodes which will participate in the key generation process for secured group communication in a distributed environment like MANET. The selection is proposed in two stages, the first phase adopts clustering technique to identify trust worthy nodes across the network and the second phase makes use of the backtracking approach in N queen´s problem to narrow down the list of trustworthy nodes and to ensure that the nodes are distributed across the entire network. This distribution of nodes aids in effective distributed key generation through secret key sharing protocol. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is analyzed w.r.t scalability and efficiency and compared with a Gittin´s index based distributed node selection for secure communication. Simulation results obtained using NS2 simulator reveal the effectiveness of the proposed work as stated.