MCDM based trust model for secure routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) do not rely on any centralized administration and they are built by the connection of various static and mobile entities (i.e. nodes). The cooperation and coordination between these network entities is very essential to establish a secure routing path. Such distributed nature of WMNs increases the vulnerability of routing protocols. Modeling and computing trust in such a distributed environment is essential since the network is self-organizing, self-configuring and relies on multihop routing. Therefore, to ensure a secure route discovery and its maintenance, it is important to compute trustworthiness of individual nodes in a cooperative manner for discovering neighbors, selecting routers and announcing topology information in WMNs. In order to detect trustworthy nodes in the networks, we propose a model based on Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) which quantifies node behaviors into discrete quantity. The proposed scheme ensures detection of malicious and misbehaving nodes in the network which is verified through code simulation.