Impact of trust model on on-demand multi-path routing in mobile ad hoc networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a set of limited range wireless nodes, which works well only if those mobile nodes are trusty and behave cooperatively. However, MANETs are subjected to a variety of attacks by malicious nodes. In order to reduce the hazards from such nodes and enhance the security of network, this paper presents a trust prediction model to evaluate the trustworthiness of nodes, which is based on the nodes' historical behaviors and fuzzy logic rules prediction method. As an application of the proposed trust model, extended from the ad-hoc on-demand multi-path distance vector routing (AOMDV) protocol, a trust-based reactive multi-path routing protocol, named as ad hoc on-demand trusted multi-path distance vector routing (AOTMDV) protocol, is proposed for MANETs. This new protocol provides a flexible and feasible approach to choose the shortest path that meets the security requirements of data packets transmission, malicious node detection in multi-agent systems and threat mitigation from those nodes. Extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed mechanism in malicious node identification and attack resistance. Experimental results show that AOTMDV achieves a remarkable improvement in the packet delivery ratio, network throughput and malicious attack resistance.