Towards neutral trust management framework in unstructured networks

Free-rider problem greatly influences the performance of unstructured networks (like ad-hoc or peer-to-peer networks). To solve such problem, we focus on trust management framework, which is intended to stimulate nodes to cooperate with each other. Currently, the existing trust management framework can be classified into trust establishment framework and reputation-based framework. However, none of them was explicitly designed with the considerations on neutrality, which is indispensable issue when devising a network system. In this paper, we investigate the relation between neutrality and trust definition, and then focus on trust management of one kind of typical unstructured networks, mobile ad hoc network (MANET). We propose a neutral trust management framework of MANET from the several aspects of neutrality characteristics, objectiveness, fairness and variegation. Then, we perform analysis on our proposed framework, which shows our proposal can achieve neutrality under the location-dependent attack of free-rider.