Opportunistic Trust Based P2P Services Framework for Disconnected MANETs

In delay-tolerant disconnected Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs), mobile devices communicate with each other as they meet opportunistically establishing peer-to-peer (P2P) connections. Trust management in this type of networks is a challenging task due to the dynamic topology and decentralized nature and has attracted mant recent research interests. In this paper we propose a trust based framework for P2P services in a delay-tolerant disconnected MANET. The proposed framework utilizes a decentralized trust model and a P2P communication protocol for secure file exchange in an opportunistic store-carry and forward mechanism. We discuss the implementation of the framework and experiment with a gnutella style P2P file sharing application in a disconnected MANET. Our results provide important insight into the key challenges and short-comings face by researchers and engineers when designing and deploying such systems.