An Overview of Trust-Based Routing Design Under Adversarial Mobile Ad Hoc Network Environment

During the last few years, the employment of trust-based routing in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) has received increasing attention. Trust-based routing protocols have been proposed as a new approach to ensure reliable routing under adversarial MANET environment. In this paper, firstly, we adopt a systematic approach to examine those typical routing attacks existing in dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol, and study how the attackers can achieve their attacking goals by executing various malicious actions. Then we analyze the necessity of trust-based routing protocols by reviewing some conventional reliable routing schemes. Specifically, we survey the state of art of the trust-based routing protocols and utilize a general framework that allows for analyzing most of them easily. Finally, we provide a comparison of these existing trust-based routing protocols based on a general framework. Our work contributes to understanding (1) how those attackers achieve their goals by disobeying the DSR regulations (2) what are the basic mechanisms when designing trust-based routing protocol and (3) the strengths and vulnerabilities of different design components.