Dependable Dynamic Source Routing without a Trusted Third Party

Ad-hoc networks are frequently used to establish communication in improvised environments without requiring any fixed infrastructure. These networks are formed with the help of their constituent wireless nodes, which are expected to forward packets for other nodes in a benign manner. The Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol is one such protocol that helps to create and maintain routes in an ad-hoc network in spite of the dynamic topology. The accurate execution of this protocol requires sustained benevolent behaviour by all participating nodes in the network. This is generally not possible to achieve and so a number of attacks may be launched against the DSR protocol, which lead to the malfunction of the network usually at a critical point in time. In this paper, we present a novel technique of discovering and maintaining dependable routes in an ad-hoc network even in the presence of malicious nodes. With the results from extensive simulations, we highlight the efficacy of our scheme and accentuate that it outperforms the DSR protocol even when 40 % of the nodes are malicious. ACM Classification: C2.2 (Computer-communication networks): Network protocols — Routing protocol