Availability based trust model of clusters for MANET

MANET (Mobile ad hoc network) is vulnerable to security attack due to its characteristics such as open network environment, lack of centralized control, dynamic topology, and so on, while traditional security mechanisms cannot meet the security requirements of MANET due to the limited communication bandwidth, computation power, memory and battery capacity, and dynamic deployment environment. Many approaches have been suggested to trade-off between the security strength and efficiency, and most of them focus on the confidentiality and integrity of MANET while pay less attention to the availability issue. Based on the analysis of availability related factors in MANET, we present an availability based trust model in this paper. Furthermore, a cluster based trust model (ABTMC, Availability Based Trust Model of Clusters) is presented with the consideration with the resource constrain of node, dynamic topology, and the unbalance of computing capability and resource capability among MANET nodes. Many availability oriented security service can be obtained based on this model.