Trust and adaptiveness enhancements to PRFDRA for secure metaheuristic path selection in MANETs

In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs), the Power-Aware River Formation Dynamics Routing Algorithm (PRFDRA) enhanced energy efficiency by forming power-aware paths and facilitating multi-flow diffusion. It remained vulnerable to internal misbehavior. RFDTrust added trust metrics to mitigate malicious activity, but applied them only in neighbor selection along downhill gradients. This limited path diversity and adaptiveness. This paper proposes TA-PRFDRA (Trust-Adaptive-Power-Aware River Formation Dynamics Routing Algorithm), a trust- and adaptiveness-enhanced version of PRFDRA. TA-PRFDRA integrates trust evaluation into all routing stages. It applies dynamic switching between Single Flow Direction (SFD) and Multi-Flow Direction (MFD) based on trust-weighted gradient variance. The algorithm utilizes a composite trust model that takes into account node energy reliability, packet forwarding behavior, route participation, and delay consistency. Trust is applied in gradient, erosion, altitude, sediment transport, and path cost computations. Simulation results show that, compared with PRFDRA, RFDTrust, RFDManet, and TORA, TA-PRFDRA achieved up to 1.33% higher packet delivery ratio (PDR). Average end-to-end delay (AE2ED) decreased by 0.14 s. Detection rate (DR) increased by up to 30.38%. Energy consumption (EC) was reduced by up to 15.94 J. Statistical analysis confirmed that improvements over RFDTrust were significant. These results demonstrate that integrating trust into all routing processes with adaptive flow control enhances reliability, latency performance, security, and energy efficiency in MANETs.