A review of trust based secure routing protocols in MANETs

A mobile ad-hoc network or MANET is a wireless, self-configuring and infrastructure-less mobile network. Due to its dynamic nature, secure routing is an inherent issue in a MANET. Cryptographic and trust based methods can be used to prevent attacks from malicious nodes in MANET. Cryptographic methods are computationally intensive and hence usually unfeasible for a low infrastructure network such as a MANET. Trust based methods are generally more efficient in comparison and can be used for secure routing. Several trust based protocols have been proposed in literature. A `trust' value is defined, using various network parameters, which represents an opinion based on behavior of a certain node or a set of nodes. This trust value is used to compute secure routes in a MANET. In this paper, different trust based routing algorithms are discussed. The performance, strengths and possible issues with the protocols are also analyzed.