A Survey on Trust Management for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Managing trust in a distributed Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is challenging when collaboration or cooperation is critical to achieving mission and system goals such as reliability, availability, scalability, and reconfigurability. In defining and managing trust in a military MANET, we must consider the interactions between the composite cognitive, social, information and communication networks, and take into account the severe resource constraints (e.g., computing power, energy, bandwidth, time), and dynamics (e.g., topology changes, node mobility, node failure, propagation channel conditions). We seek to combine the notions of "social trust" derived from social networks with "quality-of-service (QoS) trust" derived from information and communication networks to obtain a composite trust metric. We discuss the concepts and properties of trust and derive some unique characteristics of trust in MANETs, drawing upon social notions of trust. We provide a survey of trust management schemes developed for MANETs and discuss generally accepted classifications, potential attacks, performance metrics, and trust metrics in MANETs. Finally, we discuss future research areas on trust management in MANETs based on the concept of social and cognitive networks.