Trusted Spanning Tree for Delay Tolerant MANETs

Quality of service (QoS) is an important issue in delay tolerant mobile ad-hoc networks (DTMs). This work attempts to improve the QoS in DTMs by relying on spanning forests algorithms. The existing algorithms are improved by introducing the notion of trust and choosing the most robust (trustable) spanning trees among existing opportunities. The robustness/quality of the tree can be assessed based on two cost functions. In order to improve QoS in a DTM, a greedy-based heuristic is proposed to the existing algorithms and becomes G-TRUST. To aid efficient break away of low-trust node, another heuristic, BREAK heuristic, is further incorporated to G-TRUST (G-TRUST BREAK). Simulation on realistic mobility models were carried out on both G-TRUST and G-TRUST BREAK. Their results verified the advantages of incorporating these heuristics.