Trust-Based Routing Protocols for MANETs: Ensuring Security and Reliability

A wireless network of decentralized type as Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is such a network which has been growing intensively now a day, which promise to become an ever-present technology. MANET is famous for its architecture that is characterized by their highly dynamic topology, mobility, broadcast nature of wireless communication. As it promises to give these much functionalities, it must be reliable enough to use it for long-lasting purpose. In MANET, path connecting between two nodes changes continuously as it is having dynamic nature, which can be result into uncertainty in the network performance. Also it consists with broadcast nature which can be further taken as a capability to increase the size of the network. Reliability is one of the important criteria in the network as we aware MANET is self-creating network and of short-duration (certain communication) as well is having unpredictability in environment. It is necessary that system or network should work effortlessly even when some issues have been occurred or some attack takes place. It should be reliable enough to retrieve from these circumstances successfully or up to the great extent. This states that network should be reliable enough to work with any constraints (Such as uncertainty) faithfully. Trust towards each node is key through which the MANET can improve the performance in every possible state. This research work focuses on the reliability of the network which is closely related with Trust as Belief. The work proposes Reliable AODV (RAODV) protocol which is extension of plain AODV MANET routing protocol. İn RAODV protocol trust is integrated with 3 variants: Direct Trust, Indirect Trust and Global Trust. Experimental analysis shows that RAODV improves the performance of MANET. The proposed method can effectively implement MANET reliability, as demonstrated by the simulation findings and related discussions.