An Outlook on the Impact of Trust Models on Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs)

In a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET), nodes cannot rely on any fixed infrastructure for routing purposes. Rather, they have to cooperate to achieve this objective. However, the absence of any trusted third party in such networks may result in nodes deviating from the routing protocol for selfish or malicious reasons. The concept of trusted routing has been promoted to handle the problems selfish and malicious nodes cause to the network. Existing work on trusted routing has focused on integrating a trust model into the routing protocol to tolerate various classes of attacks. However, little is known about whether a trust model is effective against all the attack classes. In this paper, we show that, in general, trust models help in achieving better efficiency in MANETs in the presence of rational and malicious behavior. We also show that the trust model used achieves varied efficiency against different attack classes, showing that a single trust model may not be sufficient to handle all the attack classes.