Design issues in trust based routing for MANET

In MANET nodes help each other in data routing. MANET works well if the participating nodes cooperate with each other. It is impractical to assume that, all nodes participating in an open MANET are cooperative and honest. For individual nodes it may be benefcial to be non-cooperative and selfsh. However non-cooperation, selfshness and malicious behavior of the participating nodes may result into collapse of a MANET. Trust based routing algorithms aim to identify misbehaving and non-cooperating nodes in the MANET. These algorithms optimize the network performance by utilizing trustworthy nodes in effective way and penalizing non-cooperative nodes. This paper compares trust based and cryptographic approaches for implementing security in MANET routing. The paper discusses design issues in trust based routing protocols for MANET in details. The paper presents a survey on trust based routing protocols for MANET. The paper provides directions for future research in trust based routing for MANET.