Paper Details

In an integrated Internet-MANET a mobile node reaches the Internet through a gateway, and the choice of
gateway decides which relay nodes carry its traffic. If some of these relays accept packets and then discard them, the
choice of the nearest gateway is no longer the safest one. This paper studies a trust-based gateway selection in the ns-3
simulator. A watchdog based on overheard transmissions supplies evidence, the Beta expectation turns it into trust, and
a source switches to another gateway when the relays on its route to the current one are not trusted. Two gateways
serve a 30-node AODV network in which 0, 10, 20 and 30 per cent of the nodes drop every packet they should relay;
every setting was run ten times. Compared with selecting the nearest gateway, trust-aware selection lowered the share
of selections whose route contained a dropping relay from 5.9 to 3.6 per cent at 30 per cent dropping nodes and raised
the packet delivery ratio from 0.922 to 0.936, at the price of about seven additional gateway switches per flow. The trust
values themselves were reliable only while the opinions of other nodes were honest: when the dropping nodes also sent
false opinions, mean and median aggregation condemned 55 and 43 per cent of the honest nodes at 10 per cent
attackers, whereas weighting the opinions by the trust of their sender removed the effect. The results show that a trust
aware gateway choice gives a small but consistent gain in an attack-prone network, and that the treatment of
Recommenders decide whether the trust values can be used at all.

Mohammed Abdul Raheem, Khaleel Ur Rahman Khan, “Packet-Dropping and False-Recommendation Attacks on Trust-Based Gateway Selection in an Integrated Internet-MANET: An ns-3 Study”, International Journal of Advance Engineering and Research Development (IJAERD), Vol. 13, Issue 10, pp. 14-22, October 2026, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23769088.