A HYBRID TRUST-BASED AND PRIORITY-AWARE CONGESTION-ADAPTIVE ROUTING PROTOCOL FOR SECURE AND EFFICIENT MOBILE AD HOC NETWORKS

Abstract

Assurance, traffic management, and Quality of Service (QoS) are still ongoing and interconnected issues in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs), which are extremely flexible, infrastructure-free cellular networks. While inexpensive pathfinding is provided by traditional reactive routing technologies, such as the Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) algorithm, the system is vulnerable to packet-dropping assaults, stream congestion, and a lack of stream separation. The Hybrid AAODV–APBROP routing protocol proposed in this paper combines three identical methods: (i) an adaptive priority-based packet scheduler that prioritizes real-time and emergency flows over best-effort traffic; (ii) a queue-length-based congestion detection component that directs traffic away from overloaded paths; and (iii) a dynamic trust assessment system that identifies and isolates unauthorized packet-dropping nodes. The approach is validated by substantial NS-3 simulations for networks of 20–50 nodes with mobility. In comparison to traditional AODV, the hybrid protocol obtains a hostile node recognition rate surpassing 94%, increases the Packet Delivery Ratio by up to 49.6%, increases throughput by 82.6%, decreases end-to-end delay by 40.3%, and maintains routing cost within reasonable ranges. These findings verify that MANET transmission is demonstrably enhanced and safer when trust, congestion, and QoS are all addressed concurrently at a particular transit level as opposed to individual-criterion techniques.