F3TM: Flooding Factor based Trust Management Framework for secure data transmission in MANETs

Due to the absence of infrastructure support, secure data dissemination is a challenging task in scalable mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) environment. In most of the traditional routing techniques for MANETs, either security has not been taken into account or only one aspect of security concern has been addressed without optimizing the routing performance. This paper proposes Flooding Factor based Framework for Trust Management (F3TM) in MANETs. True flooding approach is utilized to identify attacker nodes based on the calculation of trust value. Route Discovery Algorithm is developed to discover an efficient and secure path for data forwarding using Experimental Grey Wolf algorithm for validating network nodes. Enhanced Multi-Swarm Optimization is used to optimize the identified delivery path. Simulations are carried out in ns2 to assess and compare the performance of F3TM with the state-of-the-art frameworks: CORMAN and PRIME considering the metrics including delay, packet delivery ration, overhead and throughput. The performance assessment attests the reliable security of F3TM compared to the state-of-the-art frameworks.