An Effective Enhancement of AODV Protocol in MANET

A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a standalone wireless network where nodes can communicate with each other without the need of pre-existing infrastructure such as access points or base stations. These networks are self-configuring, nodes in the network are nomadic thus topology is dynamic, capable of self-directed operation and hastily deployable, unstable links present, limited computing resources. Such features make this network vulnerable to attacks and unreliable. Communication between nodes is based on mutual trust between them. So nodes should cooperate and relay packets forwards but some nodes fails to cooperate and drop packets which are not intended for them either being selfish or due to some attack thus degrading the performance. In this research paper, a trust oriented scheme is proposed which is an enhancement of general AODV that deals with such selfish or malicious nodes. Nodes which are declared as trustworthy based on trust values are selected otherwise untrustworthy nodes are isolated from routing. This scheme shows improvement in throughput, decreases packet delay and packet loss ratio therefore, enhancing the performance. The work is implemented and simulated on NS-2. The simulation result shows the proposed scheme provides more trustworthy routing compared with general AODV in presence of packet dropping nodes in MANET.