Mechanism Design Based Nodes Selection Model for Threshold Key Management in MANETs

The design of threshold based distributed Certification Authority (CA) has been proposed to provide secure and efficient key management service in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). However, most of previous works ignore the efficiency and effectiveness and assuming there are always honest nodes performing the service. Focusing on the development of a model which can be used to select a coalition of nodes dynamically and optimally to carry out the threshold key management service during its operation in MANETs with selfish nodes, this paper formulates the dynamic nodes selection problem as combinatorial optimization problem with the objectives of maximizing the success ratio of key management service and minimizing the nodes´ cost of security and energy firstly. Then, to ensure truth-telling is the dominant strategy for any node in our scenario, we extend the payment structure of the classical Vickrey, Clarke, and Groves (VCG) mechanism design framework and divide the payment to nodes in the coalition of nodes with the consideration of the actual execution effectiveness of each one. Simulations show that proposed model enjoys an improvement of both the success ratio of key management service and lifetime of the network, and a reduction of both the cost of participating nodes and compromising probability of MANETs, compared with existing works in the presence of selfish nodes.