Exploring Trust Modeling and Management Techniques in the Context of Distributed Wireless Networks: A Literature Review

Trust Modelling and Management (TMM) techniques are frequently applied in ad-hoc Distributed Wireless Networks (DWNs) to stimulate and improve cooperation between network nodes. TMM facilitate DWNs in building a trust network that assures reliability of communication channels, offers an additional layer of security, and enables group decision making processes. Likewise, TMM became in the past decades an attractive solution for solving problems in cooperative ad hoc DWN. The proposed solutions focus on modelling trust in a social-centric approach to maintain a system where nodes trust each other, and detect untrustworthy (malicious) neighbours. The work at hand considers a time span of three years, from 2020 to 2022, where the scientific research in the domain of TMM and DWN is analysed. Our survey aggregates over 130 research papers and investigates the quality of experimental assessment done by each work. Additionally, we establish an indication on the level of experimental analysis done by each study from a TMM security perspective. Lastly, the survey offers a trust ontology, a general overview of a trust models, together with a concise description of trust threats to facilitate the reader’s understanding of TMM.