A Performance study of MANETs using a Trust Mechanism

MANETs are vulnerable to several attacks due their being open, anonymous and dynamic in nature. Hard security solutions use cryptographic techniques to provide security but these will need more computational power and energy which is also a challenge in resource constrained MANETs. Computing trust for the nodes is a soft security solution to MANETs. In this work first we adapt trust mechanisms from the literature for use in the MANET security impaired environment. The performance of the network using the proposed trust mechanism is studied under various conditions of node mobility. It is generally obsemed that mobility degrades the performance.