Trust Metric Routing to Regulate Routing Cooperation in Mobile Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Inhalt:
When a mobile wireless ad hoc network is set up, for example in an emergency operation, organizations with different security demands may be involved. There may be different levels of trust between the parties. Nevertheless, they may have a common interest in routing cooperation. Network connectivity may be improved by integrating nodes from different security domains into one common routing domain. Trust Metric Routing enables routing collaboration between different security domains: Cooperating domains utilize each other nodes as relays. At the same time, each security domain has the possibility to calculate routes, which are considered trustworthy within the domain. Thus explicit selection of forwarding policy is maintained. We have investigated routing cooperation between two domains and found that there is a node density range where routing cooperation may lead to a significant gain with regard to packet loss. Within this range the gain from increased connectivity is larger than the loss from increased congestion.