Incorporating trust and reputation in the DSR protocol for dependable routing

  • Authors:

  • Asad Amir Pirzada;Amitava Datta;Chris McDonald

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Computer Science & Software Engineering, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, W.A., 6009, Australia;School of Computer Science & Software Engineering, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, W.A., 6009, Australia;School of Computer Science & Software Engineering, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, W.A., 6009, Australia

  • Venue:
  • Computer Communications
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

An ad-hoc network is formed when two or more wireless nodes agree to forward packets on behalf of each other. As the wireless range of such nodes is severely limited, the nodes mutually cooperate with their neighbours in order to extend the overall communication range of the network. Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) is one of the commonly used protocols used in establishing ad-hoc networks. The network keeps on functioning smoothly when each node executes the routing protocol in the correct manner. However, along with benevolent nodes, there may always be some malicious and selfish nodes present in the network that try to disrupt, distort or disturb the network traffic. In this paper, we propose a novel and pragmatic scheme for establishing and sustaining trustworthy routes in the network. Each node maintains trust levels for its immediate neighbours based upon their current actions. Nodes also share these trust levels (reputations) to get ancillary information about other nodes in the network. In order to minimise control packet overhead, we have integrated the trust sharing mechanism with the DSR route discovery process in a unique manner that augments the protocol's performance in the presence of malicious nodes.