Location Aware Clustering and Epidemic Trust Management in Mobile Ad Hoc Network

Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a network with no fixed topology, no infrastructure and yet capable of performing tasks i.e., information diffusion. During the network operation the network nodes are moving, possibly in a stochastic manner, or following a certain pattern. The nodes interact and exchange information, thus spending energy which is usually limited and can not be replaced. In addition to these, the nodes must be aware of malicious nodes which will try to either intercept the node-to-node communications and/or drain the resources of the nodes. Two fundamental problems need to be addressed: The temporal extension of the network operation by uniformly exploiting the network resources and the accurate and timely detection of malicious nodes. In this paper, which is an extension of previous work of ours, we address both of these issues. 1) We propose a clustering scheme which produces clusters that are stable enough to allow for the trust information to diffuse, initially through the cluster and evidently through the entire network. 2) We propose a trust scheme which assigns and updates a trust value to every node of the network and thus reveals the malicious nodes and diffuses the information through the network.