In this proposed work a trust-based routing protocol is developed to route messages through the
highly trusted nodes to minimize the probability of dropping the messages. Thus improve the network
performance in terms of throughput and packet delivery ratio. The proposed design contains a novel secure
reactive routing protocol for Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), called TRIUMF (Trust-Based Routing
Protocol with controlled degree of Selfishness for Securing MANET against Packet Dropping Attack). In the
proposed protocol trust among nodes is represented by trust value, which consists of cooperation score, direct
trust and indirect trust. The proposed trust routing allows controlled degree of selfishness to give an incentive to
the selfish nodes to declare its selfishness behavior to its neighbor nodes, which reduce the searching time of
misbehaving nodes to search for the malicious nodes only. In the proposed routing protocol two node-disjoint
routes between the source and destination nodes are selected based on their path trust values, one marked as
primary and the other as secondary. In this work both DLL-ACK and end- to-end TCP-ACK as monitoring
tools to monitor the behavior of routing path nodes: if the data packet successfully transmitted, then the path
nodes trust value are updated positively; otherwise, if a malicious behavior is detected then the path searching
tool starts to identify the malicious nodes and isolate them from the routing path and the network. Finally this
scheme reduces the searching time of malicious nodes, and the routing protocol avoids the isolated misbehaving
node from sharing in all future routes, which improves the overall network throughput.