Mobile Anonymous Trust Based Routing Using Ant Colony Optimization

Problem statement: Ad hoc networks are susceptible to malicious attacks through denial of services, traffic analysis and spoofing. The security of the ad hoc routing protocol depends upon encryption, authentication, anonymity and trust factors. End-to-end security of data is provided by encryption and authentication, topology information of the nodes can be obtained by studying traffic and routing data. This security problem of ad hoc network is addressed by the use of anonymity mechanisms and trust levels. Identification information like traffic flow, network topology, paths from malicious attackers is hidden in anonymous networks. Similarly, trust plays a very important role in the intermediate node selection in ad hoc networks. Trust is essential as selfish and malicious nodes not only pose a security issue but also decreases the Quality of Service. Approach: In this study, a routing to address anonymous routing with a trust which improves the overall security of the ad hoc network was proposed. A new approach for an on demand ad-hoc routing algorithm, which was based on swarm intelligence. Ant colony algorithms were a subset of swarm intelligence and considered the ability of simple ants to solve complex problems by cooperation. The interesting point was, that the ants do not need any direct communication for the solution process, instead they communicate by stigmergy. The notion of stigmergy means the indirect communication of individuals through modifying their environment. Several algorithms which were based on ant colony problems were introduced in recent years to solve different problems, e.g., optimization problems. Results and Conclusion: It is observed that the overall security in the network improves when the trust factor is considered. It is seen that non performing nodes are not considered due to the proposed ACO technique.