Propagating trust in ad-hoc networks for reliable routing

Ad-hoc networks emerge when a number of mobile wireless nodes agree to mutually cooperate with each other in order to establish communication over a wide region. All nodes in the network execute a pre-agreed routing protocol to pass packets for other nodes. The dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol is one of the unique routing protocols for ad-hoc wireless networks, where each transmitted data packet contains the complete route that it has to traverse. This is due to the fact that during route discovery, all intermediate nodes contribute faithfully to the route generation process. Such an altruistic behaviour is though difficult to realize in realistic environments and so a number of malicious nodes may also participate in the route discovery process only to sabotage the network. In this paper we present a unique mechanism for establishing trusted routes in a DSR based ad-hoc network. The proposed mechanism is specifically designed for improvised networks where the establishment of a fixed or mobile trust infrastructure is considered impractical.