Trust-Enhanced Multicast Routing Protocol Based on Node's Behavior Assessment for MANETs

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a self-configuring network of mobile nodes connected by wireless links without fixed infrastructure, which is originally designed for a cooperative environment. However, MANETs are subjected to a variety of attacks by malicious nodes, in particular for attacks on the packet routing. Compared with traditional cryptosystem based security mechanisms, trust-enhanced routing protocol could provide a better quality of service. In this study, we abstract a basic decentralized effective trust inference model based on node's behavior assessment, where each peer assigns a trust value for a set of peers of interest. In this model, we introduce the 'voting' mechanism to access the recommending experience (or ratings), in order to reduce the cost of the algorithm design and the system overhead. Then combined with this trust model, a novel trust-enhanced multicast routing protocol (TeMR) is proposed. This new protocol introduces the group-shared tree strategy, which establishes more efficient multicast routes since it uses 'trust' factor to improve the efficiency and robustness of the forwarding tree. Moreover, it provides a flexible and feasible approach in routing decision making with trust constraint and malicious node detection. Experiments have been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol.