Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks are very flexible networks, since they do not depend on any infrastructure or central authority. Due to this property, MANETs are highly ubiquitous in defense, commercial and public sectors. Despite the usage, MANET faces problems with security, packet drops, network overhead, end-to-end delay and battery power. To combat these shortcomings, we have proposed a new trust based on-demand routing protocol that can adapt to the specific energy conditions of nodes in a MANET. It uses the concept of fidelity which varies depending on packet drops. This fidelity is monitored through direct and indirect methods. The main aim of the protocol is to develop a model that considers both trust and battery power of the nodes, before selecting them as prospective nodes for secure transmission of data. With dynamic battery threshold calculations, the nodes make an intelligent choice of the next hop, and packet losses are effectively minimized. In addition to providing data origin authentication services, integrity checks, the proposed “Intelligent Energy Aware Fidelity Based On-Demand Secure Routing (IEFBOD)” protocol is able to mitigate intelligent, colluding malicious agents which drop packets or modify packets etc. that they are required to forward. New packets called report and recommendation have been used to effectively detect and eliminate these malicious nodes from a network. Our protocol has been compared to other existing secure routing protocols using simulation, and it displays improved performance metrics, namely high packet delivery fraction, low normalized routing load and low end-to-end delay.

With the advent of real applications in fields like defense and domestic fields, MANET is becoming more popular. MANET does not require any infrastructure, moreover it can behave as mobile networks. These features have boosted up the popularity of MANET in the community. As more and more fields get dependent on MANET, the system needs to be more robust and less expensive. For example, in defense field security is the major issue, while in the domestic field maintaining the QoS is the major issue. To commercialize MANET the routing protocols need to be lightweight, secure and the hardware on which it is to be implemented should be low cost at the same time. We propose a lightweight, secure and efficient routing model for MANETs; which uses fidelity to allocate trust to a neighbor, thereby taking the decision whether to send data via that secure neighbor or not. It also uses new packets like report and recommendation that help the protocol to detect and eliminate the malicious nodes from the network. To observe the results we implement this protocol in hardware, on the Arduino platform in ZigBee network. We observe that our protocol exhibits high packet delivery fraction, low normalize routing load and low end to end delay, compared to existing secure routing protocols. Thereby, maintaining a constant tradeoff between the QoS and the security of the network.