Trust Routing Protocol Based on Cloud-Based Fuzzy Petri Net and Trust Entropy for Mobile Ad hoc Network

The trust-based routing mechanisms are proposed to enhance the security of the mobile ad hoc network (MANET), which use the performance metrics of a node to evaluate the trust value of the node. However, some performance metrics are fuzzy, which are easier to be described qualitatively than to be expressed quantitatively. Therefore, the inability to quantitatively express these performance metrics leads to the inaccuracy in the calculation of the trust values of nodes. Meanwhile, some routing mechanisms add the path with the highest credibility to routing table without considering the hop counts of the route in route selection, which reduces quality of service (QoS) of the routing. Aiming at the above problems, firstly, we use cloud model to deal with the fuzziness of performance metrics. Specifically, a trust reasoning model based on cloud model and fuzzy Petri net (FPN) is presented to evaluate the credibility of nodes. Then we propose a routing algorithm based on trust entropy. Routes with the minimum trust entropy are selected to add to routing table. This routing algorithm can reflect the comprehensive effect of route hops and the trust values of nodes on routing selection, thus improving QoS in MANET. Finally, the TUE-OLSR protocol is established based on the trust entropy routing algorithm and the optimized link state routing (OLSR) protocol. What’s more, the effectiveness of TUE-OLSR protocol is verified by simulation experiments, which illustrate that TUE-OLSR protocol performs better than existing trust-based OLSR protocols in terms of packet delivery ratio and average latency.