A novel approach to secure routing through Path Allegiance metric in a mobile ad hoc network

Mobile ad hoc networks are open networks which are infrastructure less, decentralized and formed spontaneously resulting in a lot of security vulnerabilities. Reliable data delivery from a source node to a destination node requires a path involving nodes which collaborate to forward the data packets which requires the nodes to assess the forwarding behavior of each other. The paper presents an uncertainty reasoning based trust management framework to compute a trust metric which is integrated into a routing protocol based upon a reliability measure called as Path Allegiance metric (PAM) which is a cumulative value obtained through the trust values of the on-path nodes upon each other. Performance analysis through simulations proves the efficiency of the proposed Path allegiance metric based routing protocol (PAMRP) in forming the trusted/secure route.