A trust based MANET routing protocol

A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is perceived as a community of autonomous mobile devices that interconnect, interact and collaborate with each other. The performance of ad-hoc networks depends on the cooperative and trust nature of these devices or nodes. The initiator node has to rely on other intermediate nodes to relay the message to the destination node. In this paper, a trust management scheme for MANET environments is proposed, where trust value is utilized for establishing the communication link between the node that initiates the communication (initiator node) and the destination node. Graph theoretic approach is utilized in the proposed scheme to find the path and both direct trust and recommendation of the neighboring nodes are utilized for computing the trusted communication path. By this trust management scheme the highest trusted but minimum routing path is achieved from the initiator node to the destination node. This trust management scheme can be included in any efficient routing algorithm to achieve highest trusted but minimum routing path from the initiator node to the destination node.