Trust Management and Security Analysis of Wireless Networks

Routing in wireless sensor, mobile ad-hoc, and vehicular networks is a crucial operation having significantly attracted scientists’ attention during the past years. Opportunistic routing, however, is a novel and promising approach, which is still an ongoing research paradigm. The purpose of opportunistic routing protocols is to increase the reliability of delivering data packets to their destination by utilizing the broadcast nature of wireless networks and selecting a set of nodes, instead of only one, as potential next-hop candidates. Apart from the reliability, security and trustworthiness of communications is also a challenging task. More specifically, almost all traditional and opportunistic routing protocols require cooperation of all network nodes to complete the routing process. However, some nodes in the network may be compromised and avoid collaboration with others due to various selfish or malicious motivations.