An efficient trust-based opportunistic routing for ad hoc networks

Recently, opportunistic routing (OR) can exploit the wireless broadcast and higher reliable opportunistic forwarding, so as to substantially increase the throughput of network. In this paper, we incorporate the trust mechanism into OR, so it can enhance the security of routing to resist the malicious attacks. While the precondition of the forwarder list is trusted, a new trusted opportunistic forwarding model based on degree of trust and cost of routing is proposed, then a trusted minimum cost routing algorithm (MCOR) is formally formulated. Finally, MCOR algorithm is verified by simulation using nsclick software and compared its performance with the classic ExOR. The simulation results show that MCOR scheme can prevent attacks from malicious nodes and boost the survivability of network. Furthermore, MCOR algorithm outperforms ExOR in terms of: throughput, expected ETX and cost of routing.