Trust based routing protocol in MANET

Traditional network routing protocols find the shortest path by minimizing a cost over the paths. Number of hops is the most common metric to measure this cost of forwarding. However, this administrative cost metric is not guaranteed to have the same level of quality in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). In addition malicious nature of nodes augments the problem even further. There is a need for generic cost metric to find the most reliable path for forwarding the packets. We propose a trust-based metric for routing in MANETs. This metric works as a reliability measure of nodes and the ad hoc routing protocol tries to find the most reliable path. We propose a quantitative measure of trustworthiness of a node based on node's properties like signal strength, stability, node's performance to forward packets and its rating by other nodes. To our knowledge, our approach is the first attempt to use a generic trust metric for reliable routing in MANETs