A Novel Fuzzy Trust-Based Secure Routing Scheme in Flying Ad Hoc Networks

Today, many studies assess vulnerabilities, threats, and attacks in flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) to provide solutions for countermeasures. Protecting FANETs against attackers and coordinating connections are challenging. The purpose of this study is to increase and maintain communication security. In this paper, a fuzzy trust-based secure routing scheme (FTSR) is presented in FANETs. FTSR utilizes two trust assessment mechanisms, namely local trust and path trust. Local trust strategy is a distributed process for finding reliable neighboring nodes and isolating hostile nodes on the network. In this regard, only reliable nodes are allowed to contribute to the path discovery procedure. This lowers the risk of forming fake paths in FANETs. Path trust strategy is responsible for identifying hostile nodes that are not identified in the local trust process. This strategy shows a general view of the trust status of the desired path. To design this mechanism, the source node runs a fuzzy system to select the safest path between source and the destination. Finally, network simulator 2 (NS2) implements FTSR, and the results such as malicious detection rate, packet delivery ratio, packet loss, accuracy, and delay are obtained from the simulation process. These results indicate that FTSR presents better performance compared to TOPCM, MNRiRIP, and MNDA. However, FTSR takes more time to find paths compared to TOPCM.