A robust trust establishment framework using Dempster-Shafer theory for MANETs

Recently, trust establishment framework has attracted extensive attention in research community as a general solution to enforce nodes to follow protocol specifications and cooperate with other nodes in a normal way. In this paper, we present a trust establishment framework that is based on first-hand evidences obtained via direct observations at the MAC layer as well as second-hand evidences that are obtained via recommendations from other nodes. To counter with the intrinsic uncertainty associated with the collected evidences from other nodes, dempster's rule for combination is applied. Dempster's rule for combination gives a numerical procedure for fusing together multiple pieces of evidence from unreliable observers. The paper, illustrates the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed framework on the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol. We present simulation results which demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed framework even in the presence of malicious nodes that propagate false trust information.