A Trust Distribution Service for MANETs

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are very useful for communications in areas with very little or no infrastructure. However, that very lack of an authoritative management infrastructure makes it imperative that nodes cooperate by passing traffic fairly and securely. The use of a reputation or trust management system can identify failed, misbehaving or malicious nodes. One aspect of trust management that has been relatively overlooked is the trust distribution service. In this paper, we use a trust model that uses local observations from all nodes in the network to calculate per-node reputation using a trust matrix. We have developed a gossip-based distribution service that reduces network-wide reputation convergence time by prioritising critical trust updates. Simulations show that this distribution service substantially outperforms naive gossip and provides insight into optimal node density for epidemic-based routing schemes in resource constrained networks.