An Intelligent Efficient Secure Routing Protocol for MANET

The security issues are more complex and challenging in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) than other conventional wireless networks due to peer to peer behavior of the participating nodes, absence of centralized routers and routing through intermediate nodes. For successful communication between a pair of source and destination it is vital that the intermediate nodes be trustworthy and don’t drop packets. Nodes in an ad hoc network may not be trustworthy either due to selfishness created by power loss or due to maliciousness relating to rogue intentions. A node that was earlier trust worthy may no longer be so at later stages due to loss of power making the continuous dynamic evaluation of trust a necessity. Also the security requirements may vary as per the conditions on the scenario. This paper proposes an intelligent protocol that takes care of both selfishness and maliciousness by evaluating the trust dynamically. The protocol is able to adjust the trust level requirement as per the demand of the situation and can work in various levels of insecure environments. With the help of exhaustive simulations, the performance of this protocol has been demonstrated and compared with the normal AODV protocol in standard lab environment.