Distributed Trust Based Routing in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Establishing trust and security in ad-hoc networks has been a long studied problem. Several methods have been proposed for evaluation and dissemination of trust in such networks, with the goal of providing secure data paths. In this paper, we propose a simple mechanism to utilize the point-to-point trust metrics derived from various methods for secure routing. The main advantage of our scheme is that it can be used in with existing on-demand routing protocols with minimal modification. Additionally, our scheme utilizes both link trust and the traditional node trust. We highlight scenarios that establish the need for associating trust with a link, rather than just a node. We validate via simulation, the security properties of our scheme in an ad-hoc network.