A trusted routing protocol for wireless mobile ad hoc networks

This paper proposes a trusted routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks, called Dynamic Mutual Trust based Routing protocol (DMTR). DMTR ensures the security of the whole network by utilizing the idea of Trust Network Connect (TNC), and improves the security of the path selected by using barrel theory. DMTR uses sociologic trust to represent the relationship among nodes. In DMTR, trust among nodes is represented by trust score which consists of direct trust score and indirect trust score. Trust updating and routing decisions are based on experienced, observed, or reported routing and forwarding behavior of other nodes. Path selection is based on trust score of the path. DMTR assumes that the network layer is based on DSR. Simulation results show that DMTR makes a network with up to 60% of misbehaving nodes behave almost as well as a benign network.