Trust prediction and trust-based source routing in mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are spontaneously deployed over a geographically limited area without well-established infrastructure. The networks work well only if the mobile nodes are trusty and behave cooperatively. Due to the openness in network topology and absence of a centralized administration in management, MANETs are very vulnerable to various attacks from malicious nodes. In order to reduce the hazards from such nodes and enhance the security of network, this paper presents a dynamic trust prediction model to evaluate the trustworthiness of nodes, which is based on the nodes’ historical behaviors, as well as the future behaviors via extended fuzzy logic rules prediction. We have also integrated the proposed trust predication model into the Source Routing Mechanism. Our novel on-demand trust-based unicast routing protocol for MANETs, termed as Trust-based Source Routing protocol (TSR), provides a flexible and feasible approach to choose the shortest route that meets the security requirement of data packets transmission. Extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed mechanism in malicious node identification and attack resistance. The results show that TSR improves packet delivery ratio and reduces average end-to-end latency.