H-TRACE: A hybrid energy-aware routing scheme for mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

We present H-TRACE as a Hybrid TRust And Competence-based Energy efficient routing scheme that saves energy by protecting mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) from various attacks and misbehaving nodes. The network consists of mobile nodes trying to access the base station (BS) through a multi-hop ad hoc network for internet or database services. H-TRACE calculates two quality metrics for nodes, namely the competence and the maliciousness levels in order to determine the forwarding and data trust in each node. The trust level aids the routing protocol functionality and makes it fairer, more efficient, and secure by avoiding forwarding packets through incompetent nodes and dropping the packets originating from malicious nodes. In H-TRACE, each node keeps records of its own experiences and calculates its local values about nodes it interacts with. These “personal” experiences are periodically sent to the more powerful BS that adds its own knowledge to the gathered reputations to compute and broadcast the central report consisting of the two qualities for every node. Every node uses the information in this report on top of its own experiences to calculate the trust values of the other nodes. H-TRACE takes into consideration the restricted energy levels of the nodes by delegating the power-consuming reputation analysis and computations to the more powerful, knowledgeable, and trusted BS. We present proof of concept calculations of H-TRACE to show its correctness, reliability, and energy efficiency.