Towards Identifying Features of Trust in Mobile Ad Hoc Network

In a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) where security is a crucial issue, trust plays an important factor that could improve the number of successful data transmission process. The higher the numbers of nodes that trust each other in the network means the higher successful communication process rates could be expected. To determine trust, there are several criteria need to be considered. These criteria which are also known as features or evidences can be used to represent each node´s trust properties in the trust evaluation process prior to initiating certain packet forwarding task. Nodes that are able to present valid features requested by source node will be included in the MANET operations. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of security vulnerabilities in MANET and the use of trust concept to enhance the security. This paper also discusses several potential features that have been used in existing works which are expected to be suitable to be used in the trust evaluation process to create a trusted MANET community.