Trust modeling for secure route discovery in mobile ad-hoc networks

Mobile ad-hoc network can be established without any predefined infrastructure and nodes in it communicate with each other in an arbitrary way. All the nodes are expected to have routing capabilities to facilitate communication in the network. The arbitrary movement of nodes and presence of compromised nodes renders the requirement of a route discovery method which can suggest a trustworthy route. In this paper a route discovery technique is suggested based on trust and hop count to find the most trustworthy and optimal path between a pair of communicating nodes. In the proposed method trust is calculated on the basis of direct observation and recommendations from other trustworthy nodes. The impact of recommendations on aggregated trust depends upon the number of interactions between recommender and recommended node. The nodes which are forwarding more number of packets with lesser delay are said to be trustworthy.