Reputation based trust management system for MANET

Trust can be interpreted as a subjective belief resulting from past interactions that predicts the future behavior of the trustee. Trust management in distributed and resource-constraint networks, such as mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is much more difficult but more crucial than in traditional hierarchical architectures, such as the base station- or access point-centered wireless LANs. Generally, MANET is characterized by decentralized control. Hence no Trusted Third Parties can be used. The trust information or evidence used to evaluate trustworthiness is only provided by peers, i.e. other nodes that form the network. Due to the dynamically changing topology and limited resources (power, bandwidth, computation etc.) the trust evaluation procedure should only rely on local information. In this paper, we propose a reputation-based trust management system for detecting and preventing MANET vulnerabilities. Both active (malicious nodes) and passive (selfish nodes) attacks are investigated and our scheme cooperatively helps the nodes to exclude them from the network while tolerating transient faults. The scheme can work with any on-demand routing protocol. We evaluated the performance of our scheme in a discrete event-simulation environment. The results indicate scalability and robustness of our proposed scheme.