Trust Integrated Cooperation Architecture for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

In recent years, several secure routing protocols have been proposed to secure communications among nodes in mobile ad hoc networks. However, they are not tailored to defend against denial of service (DoS) attacks such as flooding and packet drop attacks. This has led to the development of models that target cooperation among nodes. These models either fail to protect against flooding attacks or only defend against greedy nodes that drop packets to save battery resources. The main shortcoming of cooperation models is that they fail to evaluate the trustworthiness for other nodes. In this paper, we propose a Trust Integrated Cooperation Architecture which consists of an obligation-based cooperation model known as fellowship to defend against both flooding and packet drop attacks. In our architecture, fellowship enhances its security decisions through a trust model known as secure MANET routing with trust intrigue (SMRTI). In comparison with related models, SMRTI deploys a novel approach to communicate recommendations such that the deployed approach is free from well-known issues such as honest elicitation, free riding, bias of a recommender, and additional overhead.