An Optimized Reputation-Based Trust Management Scheme for MANET Security

Because mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have neither infrastructure support nor central administration, they imply their nodes in the routing process. Having that this latter is fundamental in a MANET deployment, it constitutes a privileged target of attackers. For instance, malicious nodes can refuse to route packets or modify their content in order to disrupt the network and to deteriorate the transmission quality. All these features raise several security challenges for the routing process making more difficult to design and implement security solutions for MANETs than for wired networks. The main contribution of this chapter is to propose a generic environment securing routing in MANETs on which a trust and reputation mechanism is defined. This environment is built upon a specific mobility-based clustering approach (MCA) organizing MANETs' nodes into clusters. Moreover, a trust management process and a delegation mechanism allowing the localization and the isolation of malicious nodes are used. The whole environment is baptized DTMCA (delegation trust MCA-based process).