Title: Trust and Reputation Management in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Abstract:

Deployment of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) in harsh or uncontrolled environments makes it easy to get compromised due to lack of centralized control infrastructure. Therefore, introducing the concept of trust in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks is necessary for its proper operation. Specifically, trust management is required when participating nodes without any previous interactions try to form a network with an acceptable level of trust relationships among themselves. We propose a model based on Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence, to establish trust by taking the selfishness property of nodes into consideration. We chose the Dempster-Shafer approach as we can combine the trust collected by different nodes by using the Dempster’s Combination rule. We specifically concentrate on data-centric trust establishment rather than node-centric, in which we focus to evaluate trustworthiness of the data reported by the other nodes rather than of the nodes themselves.