AntTrust: A Novel Ant Routing Protocol for Wireless Ad-hoc Network Based on Trust between Nodes

A wireless ad-hoc network is a network which does not use any infrastructure such as access points or base station. Instead, the mobile nodes forward packets to each others, allowing communication among nodes outside wireless transmission range. In this dynamic network, each node is considered as a mobile router but in an energy-conserving manner. This fact makes node an active element in the network which is able of the best and of the worst. Actually, a malicious node can easily disrupt the proper functioning of the routing by simply refusing to forward routing message (misbehavior node), inject the wrong routing packets, modifying others, etc. In this paper, we propose a new routing protocol for wireless ad-hoc network based on multi-agent systems and particularly on ant behavior. The novelty of our protocol relies in the fact that, apparently for the first time, a protocol combines at the same time routing on one side and trust level and reputation between nodes on the other side. This combination permits to increase the security of route establishment. More generally, this protocol opens the door to the use of different agents for obtaining different mixed functionalities, routing and trust level in this paper but also other functionalities like key-distribution.