A routing protocol based on trusted and shortest path selection for mobile ad hoc network

A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a peer-to-peer wireless network where nodes can communicate with each other without the use of infrastructure such as access points or base stations. Nodes can join and leave the network at anytime and are free to move randomly and organize themselves arbitrarily. Due to this nature of MANET, it is possible that there could be some malicious and selfish nodes that try compromise the routing protocol functionality and makes MANET vulnerable to security attacks. In this paper, we present a security-enhanced AODV (Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector Routing) routing protocol called R-AODV (Reliant Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector Routing). The implementation of this work is done by modified a trust mechanism known as direct and recommendations trust model and then incorporating it inside AODV which will allow AODV to not just find the shortest path, but instead to find a short path that can be trusted. This enhances security by ensuring that data does not go through malicious nodes that have been known to misbehave. The R-AODV protocol has been implemented and simulated on NS-2. Based on the simulation result, it can be shown that R-AODV does provide a more reliable data transfer compared to the normal AODV if there are malicious nodes in the MANET.