Dealing with delegation in a trust-based MANET

MANET (Mobile Ad hoc NETwork) is a self organized network with nodes collaborating in order to communicate. Hence, availability of the resources in such network is fundamental. Availability concerns essentially the network nodes as well as routing and forwarding actions accessibility. Generally, nodes lifetime is consumed by legitimate traffic. It also can be shortened or even depleted by deny of service attacks penalizing the routing process. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme based on a delegation process and allowing the perpetuity of routes without neither stopping packets transfer nor novel route calculation. The purpose of this delegation is to allow a node with a short lifetime to be replaced by another one avoiding a novel route definition. Due to the criticality of the delegation task, it must be made within a secure environment i.e. between trustworthy nodes. Our proposal is then, a trust-based delegation scheme extending routing protocols. This scheme was designed in order to fit with MANET characteristics such as dynamicity, decentralization, etc and is based on three phases: initialization, negotiation and revocation.