Generalized Trust Model for Cooperative Routing in MANETs

Routing in a Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) is prone to various security attacks due to the limitations such as openness, decentralized and infrastructure less network operations. Many of such routing attacks are possible to detect by observing the functional behavior of nodes such as sincerity in packet forwarding, maintaining packet integrity, etc. To do this, the trustworthiness of each node has to be assessed via behavior observation. There exist several methods in the literature for trust assessment. However, each trust model has its advantages and limitations. Further, a common trust model that can be applicable to diverse routing protocols is limited. To this end, the objective of this paper is to propose a Generalized Trust Model (GTM) over MANET routing protocols. GTM is designed to offer self-adaptability, lightweight communication, and effective identification and isolation of malicious nodes during the routing process. The proposed trust model has applied with proactive, reactive, and geographic routing methods. Results that are obtained from the network simulator NS-2 have shown that the proposed method significantly improved the network performance metrics such as packet delivery fraction, throughput, routing load, and end-to-end delay as compared to existing trust models.