23-05-2014, 02:43 PM
Light-weight trust-based routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks
[b]Abstract: [/b]
Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) were originally designed for a cooperative environment. To use them in hostile
environments, trust-based routing can be used, where instead of establishing the shortest routes as done in traditional routing
protocols, most trusted routes are established. In this study, the authors present a light-weight trust-based routing protocol. It
is light-weight in the sense that the intrusion detection system (IDS) used for estimating the trust that one node has for
another, consumes limited computational resource. Moreover, it uses only local information thereby ensuring scalability. Our
light-weight IDS takes care of two kinds of attacks, namely, the blackhole attack and the grey hole attack. Whereas our
proposed approach can be incorporated in any routing protocol, the authors have used AODV as the base routing protocol to
evaluate our proposed approach and give a performance analysis.
Most of the Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) secure
routing protocols [1] in the literature use cryptographic
techniques to secure the routing protocol. However, the
downside of using cryptographic tools is that they are
known to be computationally very expensive, which does
not lend well to incorporating them in resource-constrained
mobile devices. Hence, in the attempt to prevent some
attacks, these protocols create new avenues for denial of
service (DoS) attacks [2]. Besides, several such secure
routing protocols presume the existence of a centralised or
distributed trusted third party in the network [3].
Thus, it is becoming more acceptable to consider trust-
based routing as a viable security solution, in which a trust-
based scheme is used to protect the routing protocol. Every
node in the network independently executes a trust model
to estimate the trust it has on other nodes in network. This
estimated trust value is used during routing decisions.
Trust-based routing protocols attempt to establish most
trusted routes rather than shortest routes as is done in
traditional routing protocols.