Light-Weight Trust-Based On-Demand Multipath Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc networks are originally designed for the environment that is cooperative and in which every node has constrained resources such as energy and communication radius. In virulent environments, compared with traditional methods, trust-based routing protocol could bring better service quality. In this study, considering the black-hole attack and the grey-hole attack, we build a novel trust model. And then a light-weight trust-based multipath routing protocol called LWT-AOMDV is proposed based on the proposed model, extending from the AOMDV. The key issue of our work is to establish multiple trustworthy paths and to detect malicious nodes in time. Our on-demand route maintenance mechanism in this protocol reduces control overhead by presenting the notion of path error instead of route error. Moreover, our new protocol explores the tradeoff between the overhead and the service quality. Simulation results via ns-2 simulator demonstrate that our approach achieves a great improvement in the packet delivery ratio at the expense of few additional resources.