Mitigating routing misbehavior in Dynamic Source Routing protocl using trust-based reputation mechanism for wireless ad-hoc networks

Routing is a key factor in the design of modern communication networks, especially in wireless ad-hoc networks (WANs). In WANs, both selfish and malicious nodes are the misbehaving nodes and are significant routing and security problems. The proposed mechanism presents a trust model to detect selfish and malicious nodes to avoid these nodes becoming routing nodes. In addition, the proposed paper provides a way to detect and prevent false accusation and false recommendation. The second-hand reputation information is calculated from its route cache of the interested nodes to reduce traffic overhead. The proposed mechanism is based on the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol. We compare the performance of the proposed scheme with that of Cooperation of Nodes: Fairness In Dynamic Ad-Hoc Networks (CONFIDANT) in terms of two performance metrics: throughput and reputation computation overheads under selfish and malicious attacks. By comparison, we notice that the proposed mechanism outperforms CONFIDANT in all two categories. The simulation results also indicate that the proposed mechanism can stimulate nodes to cooperate with each other and improve the performance of WANs.