Trust-based strategies for wireless networks under partial monitoring

In modern wireless networks autonomous agents may exhibit selfish or malicious behavior which can compromise the performance of the network. For this reason, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) have been proposed to monitor the agents' behavior, along with the deployment of Trust/reputation Management Systems (TMS) to enforce cooperation among the agents. IDS may not continuously monitor agents' behavior to avoid excessive deployment costs. In this work we consider agents that exhibit both selfish and malicious behavior and study their pairwise interactions when they participate in a packet-forwarding task, in the scenario of partial monitoring of their actions by the IDS. We investigate the decision-making process of the agents and derive conditions that if satisfied, the trust-based strategy proposed by the TMS constitutes an optimal strategy for the agents.