Enhancing security in MANETS through trust-aware routing

A Mobile ad Hoc Network is a collection of nodes which is an infrastructure less network and hence can be easily established and deployed instantly. In addition to their normal operation, all the nodes in this kind of network act as routers as well. Because of the mobility and dynamic nature of the network, all the nodes are free to move randomly and hence topology of a MANET changes very frequently. This invites the complexity of routing the packets from source to destination. Also, as a MANET is a multi-hop network, the packets should pass through intermediate nodes which always need not be genuine all the time which poses many security issues in MANET's. Our paper discusses a secure routing protocol which is a trust based secure routing scheme that considers information collected from neighbouring nodes. Based on the trust information received about a node from its neighbouring nodes and its past history of transactions, we assign a trust value for every node in the network. If this value is less than a specific threshold set by the coordinator nodes, that specific node can be considered as a malicious node and hence routing paths should not involve such nodes, which guarantees secure path routing. This protocol has been implemented on NS-2 and results show that this protocol achieved better performance in terms of the packet delivery ratio and throughput when compared to existing routing schemes in literature.