Trust Based HWMP Protocol in High-Performance Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks are multi hop wireless networks with high performance requirements. To enhance the performance, a large number of routing protocols have been proposed focussing on various link properties.The metrics designed to capture various link properties make an important assumption that nodes cooperate in network operations. On the other hand, the nodes are spread over larger area and maintained by different operators which lack cooperation leading to selfish and malicious behavior. To address this issue, several works have been carried out by modelling trust/reputation into a network. In this paper, we modify an existing trust based secure routing framework, AODV-REX, tailored to mesh networks, as a first step. We observe that the existing trust models for distributed wireless networks are not directly employable and need to be significantly modified to meet the performance requirements of mesh networks. Further, we propose a trust extension to HWMP (Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol), called HWMP-TX based on a new trust model. The analysis and simulation results show that HWMP-TX is resilient to various internal attacks and achieves better performance.