Trust-aware opportunistic routing protocol for wireless networks

Next hop selection can be considered as the most important challenge regarding packet routing in wireless networks. Opportunistic Routing is a novel research topic which benefits from the broadcast nature of the wireless medium to route packets to their destination more reliably. Trust management protocols, on the other hand, are developed to assist in delivering data packets in presence of attacker nodes in the network. In this paper, a novel opportunistic routing protocol is proposed which selects next hop forwarder nodes not only according to the link delivery probability between nodes, but also based upon the trust level that nodes calculate for other nodes while communicating packets. Simulation results represent that the proposed method performs well in a hostile environment where malicious nodes prevent from forwarding received packets.