Trust-Based Task Assignment in Autonomous Service-Oriented Ad Hoc Networks

We propose and analyze a trust management protocol for autonomous service-oriented mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) populated with service providers (SPs) and service requesters (SRs). We demonstrate the resiliency and convergence properties of our trust protocol design for service-oriented MANETs in the presence of malicious nodes performing opportunistic service attacks and slandering attacks. Further, we consider a situation in which a mission comprising dynamically arriving tasks must achieve multiple conflicting objectives, including maximizing the mission reliability, minimizing the utilization variance, and minimizing the delay to task completion. We devise a trust-based heuristic algorithm to solve this multi-objective optimization problem with a linear runtime complexity, thus allowing dynamic node-to-task assignment to be performed at runtime. Through extensive simulation, we demonstrate that our trust-based node-to-task assignment algorithm outperforms a non-trust-based counterpart using blacklisting techniques while performing close to the ideal solution quality with perfect knowledge of node reliability over a wide range of environmental conditions.