Mousumi Sardar and Koushik Majumder, West Bengal University of Technology, India

A mobile ad hoc network is a wireless network in which no infrastructure is available. MANET is a self-configuring network. Due to dynamic nature of MANET it is very challenging work to employ a secure route. The intermediate nodes cooperate with each other as there is no such base station or access point. The routing protocols play important role in transferring data. Cryptographic mechanisms are used in routing protocols to secure data packets while transmitted in the network. But cryptographic techniques incur a high computational cost and can’t identify the nodes with malicious intention. So, employing cryptographic techniques in MANET are quite impractical as MANETs have limited resource and vulnerable to several security attacks. Trust mechanism is used as an alternative to cryptographic technique. Trust mechanism secures data forwarding by isolating nodes with malicious intention using trust value on the nodes. In this paper we survey different trust based protocols of MANET and compare theirperformances.

Network Protocols, Mobile Network, Cooperation, Dynamic topology, Route trust, Path trust