TrustOpt: An optimized trust-based approach for integrated attacks in MANETs

The dynamic and decentralized nature of mobile adhoc networks (MANETs) made it challenging for a network to protect it from intruders so, security is the prominent challenge in MANETs. Earlier the network was affected by a single intruder but now sometimes there is more than one intruder that collaboratively attacks the network and ruins its performance. So, for safe communication network should employ some security parameters and approaches that can prevent the network from such types of attacks. With this aim, this work proposes a novel trust-based approach which takes trust as its key factor and selects a communication path based on an optimizer. Here, trust is computed based on the past communication of the nodes and it is dynamically updated with network behavior. The optimization algorithms ant colony optimization (ACO), and whale optimization (WOA) are combined to form a hybrid algorithm for optimal path selection. The architecture named TrustOpt first divides the network into k clusters using fuzzy trust clustering which selects a cluster node as a head only if it has the highest trust levels. Then optimizer selects the secure path for communication. This proposed approach is tested using a network simulator and the simulated network consists of an integrated attack scenario containing blackhole, wormhole, grayhole, and denial of service (DoS) attacker nodes in different ratios. The simulation results of different scenarios presented the effectiveness of the proposed approach by improving packet delivery ratio, throughput, latency, and packet loss.