Hierarchical trust management of community of interest groups in mobile ad hoc networks

In mission-critical applications deployed in mobile ad hoc networks, very frequently a commander will need to assemble and dynamically manage Community of Interest (COI) mobile groups to achieve the mission assigned despite failure, disconnection or compromise of COI members. In this paper, we present a dynamic hierarchical trust management protocol that can learn from past experiences and adapt to changing environment conditions (e.g., increasing misbehaving node population, evolving hostility and node density, etc.) to enhance agility and maximize application performance. With trust-based misbehaving node detection as an application, we demonstrate how our proposed COI trust management protocol is resilient to node failure, disconnection and capture events, and can help maximize application performance in terms of minimizing false negatives and positives in the presence of mobile nodes exhibiting vastly distinct QoS and social behaviors.