Trusted route discovery with TORA protocol

An ad-hoc network is formed when a group of wireless nodes pledge to help each other in passing packets based upon a pre-agreed protocol. Temporally ordered routing algorithm (TORA) is one of the commonly used protocols for ad-hoc wireless networks. Route discovery in TORA is done in a cooperative manner with intermediate nodes contributing to route generation. Precision in route build-up demands that all network nodes portray persistent benevolent behavior. However, this is not always possible to achieve and a number of malicious nodes may participate in the TORA route discovery process only to sabotage the network by violating the protocol. We present a novel mechanism for establishing trust in ad-hoc networks that execute the TORA protocol. The routes discovered using our model are not cryptographically secure but each one of them carries a confidence measure regarding its suitability in the current scenario.