Trust Management in Wireless Mobile Networks with Cooperative Communications

Cooperative communication makes use of the broadcast nature of the wireless medium where adjacent nodes overhear the message transmitted by the source and assist in the transmission by relaying the overheard message to the destination. Although cooperative communication brings in significant benefits, it also raises serious security issues to wireless mobile networks. For example, there exists a possibility that a node refuses to cooperate when it is selected for cooperation or deliberately drop the received packets. In wireless mobile networks with cooperative communication, trust management is an important mechanism to monitor such networks for violations of security. In this paper, we propose a trust management method for wireless mobile networks with cooperative communications. Conventional Bayesian methodology is insufficient for the cooperative communication paradigm, as it is biased by the channel conditions and relay selection decision processes. Therefore, we modify the conventional trust management method by incorporating not only the relay selection policy but also the dynamic wireless channel conditions among the source, relays and destination. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.