Reputation Routing in MANETs

Abstract

In this work we present a trust computation method, Direct Trust Computation, and utilize it to design a Reputation Routing Model (RRM) for MANETs. We utilize this routing framework to mitigate the effect of blackhole attacks in OLSR without altering the original protocol or increasing its overhead. Our solution can isolate bad nodes in the network and select the most trusted path to route packets. We evaluate the performance of our model by emulating network scenarios on Common Open Research Emulator (CORE) for static as well as dynamic topologies. From our findings, it is observed that RRM substantially outperforms the original OLSR protocol in terms of packet delivery rates in presence of a malicious node, unless the mobility rate is quite high. RRM is therefore useful in mitigating the effect of blackhole attacks in MANETs, particularly in low mobility scenarios.