Trust Establishment in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a self-configurable infrastructure less wireless network of mobile devices. The devices or nodes can move randomly in the network which results in frequent change in the topology. This paper proposes trust establishment in MANET. Since the nodes are constantly entering and leaving the network, security in the network will be less. So in order to establish security first the nodes in the network must be trustable. In this paper we establish trust in the network which is fully based on the neighbor trust. There is no centralized authority to assign trust. Trust value is assign to the node based on the history of communication pattern of that particular node and a trustable path from source to destination is computed by aggregating the trust values of the nodes. The simulation is done in NS-2 and the results show that the overhead, drop for the trusted network is less compared with normal network with same number of nodes.