Distributed Trust Based Routing in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Establishing trust and security in ad-hoc networkshas been a long studied problem. Several methods have beenproposed for evaluation and dissemination of trust in suchnetworks, with the goal of providing secure data paths. Wepropose a mechanism to utilize trust metrics derived from variousmethods for secure routing. Our scheme can be used in withexiting on-demand routing protocols with minimal modification.We highlight scenarios that establish the need for associating trustwith a link, rather than just a node. Our scheme incorporatesboth link and node trust to avoid adversarial paths in adistributed manner. We validate via simulation, the securityproperties of our scheme in an ad-hoc network.