An autonomic knowledge monitoring scheme for trust management on mobile ad hoc networks

An important characteristic in trust management frameworks is how nodes obtain information about the trustworthiness of other nodes. Some trust management models are based on local information, while others use both information of neighbors and remote nodes. Despite the wide of information used, the existing trust monitoring approaches are mainly based either on passive monitoring mechanisms or on active monitoring mechanisms. While passive monitoring suffers from limitations ranging from strict antenna requirements to high battery use, active dissemination alternatives generate extra overhead to the resource constrained mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). In this paper, we propose a new knowledge monitoring scheme for trust management on MANETs based on autonomic principles. The proposed scheme minimizes the overhead using transiting packets on the network to update nodes knowledge about other nodes trustworthiness. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism improves significantly the performance of underlying network, providing a sufficient correct knowledge about nodes trustworthiness required by trust management frameworks.