Multi-path and Message Trust-Based Secure Routing in Ad Hoc Networks

The security of the messages travelling in ad hoc networks is one of the most critical issues of creating and maintaining practical networks over a period of time. Being a multi-hop network, the behaviour of the nodes forwarding the message becomes critical, and thus it is useful to have a certain level of trust on the forwarding nodes. The trust value, however, does not remain stable and must change with time, as a friendly node may turn malicious, and vice versa. Moreover, it is also desirable that the message contents are not easily revealed to the intermediate nodes and there is even some protection against message modification. However, the encryption and message integrity checking comes at a price of increased computation overheard at multiple nodes. This work introduces an approach that can be applied to calculate the trust in a dynamic way, and also protect the message against modification, without significantly increasing the overheads. The performance of the proposed approach has been established through simulations in terms of packet delivery ratio and the number of times the packet was broken into parts, and the results of the simulation were found to support the above claim.