An evolutionary self-cooperative trust scheme against routing disruptions in MANETs

Abstract

How to achieve reliable routing has always been a major issue in the design of communication networks, among which mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) possess the most adversarial networking environment due to the absence of fixed infrastructure, the nature of open transmission media and the dynamic network topology. These characteristics also make the design of routing protocols in MANETs become even more challenging. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary self-cooperative trust (ESCT) scheme that imitates human cognitive process and relies on trust-level information to prevent various routing disruption attacks. In this scheme, mobile nodes will exchange trust information and analyze received trust information based on their own cognitive judgment. Eventually, each node dynamically evolves its cognition to exclude malicious entities. The most attractive feature of ESCT is that they cannot compromise the system even if the internal attackers know how the security mechanism works. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of ESCT scheme under various routing disruption attack situations. Simulation results affirm that ESCT scheme promotes network scalability and ensures the routing effectiveness in the presence of routing disruption attackers in MANETs.