Trust management in mobile ad hoc networks for bias minimization and application performance maximization

Trust management for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) has emerged as an active research area as evidenced by the proliferation of trust/reputation protocols to support mobile group based applications in recent years. In this paper we address the performance issue of trust management protocol design for MANETs in two important areas: trust bias minimization and application performance maximization. By means of a novel model-based approach to model the ground truth status of mobile nodes in MANETs as the basis for design validation, we identify and validate the best trust protocol settings under which trust bias is minimized and application performance is maximized. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with an integrated social and quality-of-service (QoS) trust protocol (called SQTrust) with which we identify the best trust aggregation setting under which trust bias is minimized despite the presence of malicious nodes performing slandering attacks. Furthermore, using a mission-oriented mobile group utilizing SQTrust, we identity the best trust formation protocol setting under which the application performance in terms of the system reliability of the mission-oriented mobile group is maximized.