Trust and Recommendations in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Recently several trust and reputation models have been proposed to enhance the security of mobile ad hoc networks. In these models, recommendations are circulated by forwarding explicit messages or introducing extra message headers. Apart from incurring additional overhead, the recommendations are prone to issues such as recommender´s bias, honest-elicitation, and free-riding. In this paper, we propose a trust model to enhance the security of mobile ad hoc networks and to address the issues related to recommendations. The model uses only trusted routes for communication, and isolates malicious nodes depending on the evidence collected from direct interactions and recommendations. It deploys a novel approach for communicating recommendations such that they are free from recommender´s bias, honest-elicitation, and free-riding. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of our model.