TEDS: A Trusted Entropy and Dempster Shafer Mechanism for Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces TEDS, a trust mechanism combining entropy and Dempster Shafer theory to detect and isolate malicious nodes in Wireless Mesh Networks, enhancing security and packet delivery.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel lightweight trust detection method called TEDS that effectively mitigates blackhole attacks in WMNs using entropy and Dempster Shafer belief theory.

Findings

Improved packet delivery ratio in simulations.

Effective detection and isolation of malicious nodes.

Slight increase in routing overhead.

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have emerged as a key technology for the next generation of wireless networking due to its self-forming, self-organizing and self-healing properties. However, due to the multi-hop nature of communications in WMN, we cannot assume that all nodes in the network are cooperative. Nodes may drop all of the data packets they received to mount a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. In this paper, we proposed a lightweight trust detection mechanism called Trusted Entropy and Dempster Shafer (TEDS) to mitigate the effects of blackhole attacks. This novel idea combines entropy function and Dempster Shafer belief theory to derive a trust rating for a node. If the trust rating of a node is less than a threshold, it will be blacklisted and isolated from the network. In this way, the network can be assured of a secure end to end path free of malicious nodes for data forwarding. Our proposed idea has been extensively tested in simulation using network simulator NS-3 and simulation results show that we are able to improve the packet delivery ratio with slight increase in normalized routing overhead.