Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) routing is a very challenging task because of the
dynamic nature of the network. The linking of provisional communication assures based on the
infrastructure of MANET, however, there is no centralised monitoring process for making the
routing in MANETs in terms of trust and security. Therefore, the stability routing is not
considered, which may break easily in dynamic MANETs. Thus, this paper introduces a trustbased
secure routing protocol using the proposed atom whale optimisation algorithm (AWOA),
which is the trust-aware routing protocol. The developed atom whale optimisation is utilised to
select the optimal route with respect to the trust factors, like average encounter rate (AER), and
successful cooperation frequency (SCF), integrity factor, and the forwarding rate. Moreover,
secure routing is performed between the nodes using the proposed AWOA. The AWOA is the
integration of atom search optimisation (ASO), and whale optimisation algorithm (WOA) that
inherits the faster global convergence. The fitness function is newly modelled considering
mobility, and trust factors. The proposed AWOA outperformed other methods with a minimal
end-to-end delay of 0.0083 sec, maximal packet delivery ratio (PDR) of 97.73%, and the maximal
throughput of 85.05% respectively.