A Secure Clustering in MANET through Direct Trust Evaluation Technique

Ad hoc network is a self organizing wireless network, made up of mobile nodes that act in both way as node and router. Wired network with fixed infrastructure defense against attacks using firewalls and gateways, nevertheless for wireless network with dynamic structure attacks can come from anywhere and at any time, because mobile nodes are unguarded to security attacks. To ensure secure data transmission and for proper functioning of network operations trustworthiness of the node has to be proved before initiating any group activity. When MANET nodes are used for large scale operations, dynamic nature of the MANET induces many problems in terms of routing delay, bandwidth and resource consumption.

Consequently many clustering algorithms invented by researchers for betterment of MANET resources. With this objective trust based clustering is used to divide the wholenetwork into sub groups based on trust value. The trustworthiness of the node is evaluated by direct trust evaluation technique and the trust value at each node is calculated as fuzzy value and it lies in between zero and one. The sub group(cluster) security is ensured by electing trustworthy node as Cluster Head(CH). Finally the proposed Trust based Clustering Algorithm(TBCA) is proved its superiority with existing Enhanced Distributed Weighted Clustering Algorithm(EDWCA) based on some metrics like delay, PDR, packet drop and overhead etc.