Location-aided and secure routing protocol for heterogeneous multi-hop wireless networks

Most of the existing routing protocols for heterogeneous multi-hop wireless networks (HWMNs) use on-demand routing protocols owing to their suitability for dynamic topology environments, but it causes wastes of network resources with large number of data packets being broadcast. Furthermore, some nodes in heterogeneous wireless multi-hop networksmay be malicious or selfish nodes which can easily lead to link attacks. A novel routing protocol called trust-based secure routing protocol with auxiliary of nodes' location information (TSRAL) is proposed for the establishment of a secure routing protocol with a lower overhead for HWMNs which combines the location information and trust value of nodes to select the next forwarding nodes. The destination node selects an optimal path from multiple paths according to the total trust value and the hop number of routes. Simulation results demonstrate that TSRAL can not only reduce the number of hops and data packets being broadcast in the process of routing but also ensure the safety of the route.