A light-weight trust-based QoS routing algorithm for ad hoc networks

In a mobile ad hoc network (MANET), the lack of a trusted infrastructure makes secure and reliable packet forwarding very challenging, especially for providing QoS guarantee for multimedia applications. In this paper, we firstly introduce the concept of trust and QoS metric estimation into establishing a trust-based QoS model. In this model, we estimate the trust degree between nodes from direct trust computation of direct observation and indirect trust computation by neighbors’ recommendations. On the other hand, due to the NP-completeness of the multi-QoS constraints problem, we only take into account link delay as the QoS constraint requirement. Then, we design a trust-based QoS routing algorithm (called TQR) from the trade-off between trust degree and link delay. At last, by using NS2 we implement this algorithm based on AODV (Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector). We compare its performance with AODV, Watchdog-DSR and QAODV. The simulation results show that TQR scheme can prevent attacks from malicious nodes and improve the security performance of the whole network, especially in terms of packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay, routing packet overhead and detection ratio of malicious nodes.