A trust based protocol for energy-efficient routing in self-organized MANETs

Mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is an energy constraint multi-hop network and its nodes have routing capability with limited battery power. In such a network, establishing a correct and efficient route is a crucial design issue. But a more challenging goal is to provide an energy-efficient multi-hop route between source-destination pair. Thus, the routing protocols should setup an energy-efficient route between source-destination pair considering the energy consumption and residual energy of the nodes. Cooperative transmission, a recent technology, optimizes energy consumption of the nodes in the networks. The trust based routing mechanism is one way to form a cooperation among nodes for establishing an energy-efficient route between source-destination pair. In this paper, we first introduce an energy consumption model to calculate the energy-factor¹ of the nodes and then propose a trust based protocol for energy-efficient routing. We also adopt a trust module to track the value of routing metric. Simulation results show that our proposed protocol reduces delay, routing overhead, and increases packet delivery ratio by consuming less energy compared to AODV and DSR, the popular existing routing protocols.