A trust approach for node cooperation in MANET

Abstract

In MANET, Node misbehavior due to selfish or malicious reasons can significantly degrade the performance of ad hoc networks. To cope with misbehavior in such self-organized networks, an incentive mechanism must be in place. In this study, a trust-based incentive model on a self-policing mechanism is proposed to make collaboration rational for selfish/malicious nodes. This trust system makes them evaluate the trust of their neighbor locally to mitigate contamination by direct observation and the use of second-hand information available. In our approach, every node maintains a trust rating about every node else they care about. Meanwhile, trust fading and redemption are brought about by update and re-establishment of the trust to show robustness. Performance by simulation reveals that in the case of existing malicious nodes, Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) with proposed trust-based node incentive mechanism performs better than DSR in terms of packet successful delivery ratio and mean number of packets dropped. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.