A Trusted Routing Mechanism for Mobile Social Networks

In recent years, mobile social networks (MSNs) have developed rapidly and their application fields are becoming more and more widespread. Due to the continuous movement of nodes in mobile social networks, the network topology is very unstable. How to ensure the credibility of network communication is a subject worth studying. In this paper, based on the characteristics of mobile social networks, the definition of trust level is introduced into the DSR routing protocol, and a trusted DSR routing mechanism (TDR) is proposed. The scheme combines the sliding window model to design the calculation method of trust level between nodes and path trust level. The nodes in the network participate in the routing process according to their trust level. When the source node receives multiple routes carried by the response, the appropriate trusted path is selected according to the path trust level. Through simulation analysis, compared with the original DSR protocol, the TDR protocol improves the performance of average delay, route cost and packet delivery fraction, and verifies the reliability and credibility of the TDR protocol.