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NMTBR: Normalized Multilevel Trust Based Routing for Security Against Packet Drop Attacks in MANETs
Nitin Khanna, Sandeep Singh, Anshu Bhasin and Kamal Malik

Purpose: This paper aims to put forward a quarantine phased normalized multilevel trust based routing mechanism for mitigation of packet drop attacks in MANET.

Design/methodology/approach: The new mechanism uses the Packet Forwarding Ratio, Residual energy, Connectivity Index, Link Quality Index and Control Flow Ratio to calculate the slotted trust value. Then final trust is calculated by balancing current slotted trust and historical trust. The enhancement in base routing protocol is performed to support trust notion, dissemination for isolation, and effective routing. Further, the quarantine phase algorithm is proposed to minimize the false positivity which makes trust based system more accurate. Dissemination procedure and local neighbourhood recommender system is employed for isolation of malicious node with increased accuracy.

Findings: A reliable routing paradigm is presented that boosts the mitigation mechanism. The routing paradigm is enhanced with introduction of new fields in existing packets of generic routing protocol. This enhancement is done to incorporate the notion of trust. Some new packets added in base routing protocol to help in dissemination, validation and recommendation as well. With the help of this, a secure and reliable route is formed that helps in prevention of attacks. The advantage of new mechanism is that it accurately mitigate and isolate packet drop attacks with minimum routing overheads and maximum energy efficiency. The simulation of the proposed mechanism is performed using Java-Matlab Interface. Through simulation, validation of effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed mechanism on the basis of different parameters is performed against the published mechanism. From the analysis, it is found that NMTBR has 1.63% higher packet delivery ratio, 12.77 lower routing overhead and 17.59% higher battery efficiency than BEST.

Originality/value: The focus of new mechanism is to calculate the trust with least number of communication packets, because communication packets consumes more energy than computation. In this context, we have integrated the notion of trust in base routing protocol to enhance the network life time.

Keywords: MANET, trust algorithm, packet drop attack, secure routing, wireless networks, isolation, quarantine phase algorithm

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