Analysis of trust enhancement for cooperative communication in wireless networks

Multipath fading during signal propagation is a significant limitation in wireless networks. Cooperative Communication aims to provide the solution to this problem of nodes of link fading with cooperative spatial diversity. Much work has been done in this area, and there are multiple ways the nodes in a wireless network can cooperate with each other. However, issues of trust certification between the nodes while cooperating, has not been addressed in many works thus far. In this paper, we discuss some of the issues which might arise in an uncontrolled cooperative environment in the absence of trust. The paper describes some of the work related to trust establishment in ad hoc networks, as well as in centralized networks. Furthermore, we correlate these concepts and model an applicable trust enhancement mechanism for cooperative communication for both types of network architectures.