Biblio

The distinctive features of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), including dynamic topology and open wireless medium, may lead to MANETs suffering from many security vulnerabilities. In this paper, using recent advances in uncertain reasoning that originated from the artificial intelligence community, we propose a unified trust management scheme that enhances the security in MANETs. In the proposed trust management scheme, the trust model has two components: trust from direct observation and trust from indirect observation. With direct observation from an observer node, the trust value is derived using Bayesian inference, which is a type of uncertain reasoning when the full probability model can be defined. On the other hand, with indirect observation, which is also called secondhand information that is obtained from neighbor nodes of the observer node, the trust value is derived using the Dempster-Shafer theory (DST), which is another type of uncertain reasoning when the proposition of interest can be derived by an indirect method. By combining these two components in the trust model, we can obtain more accurate trust values of the observed nodes in MANETs. We then evaluate our scheme under the scenario of MANET routing. Extensive simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Specifically, throughput and packet delivery ratio (PDR) can be improved significantly with slightly increased average end-to-end delay and overhead of messages.

Game theory can provide a useful tool to study the security problem in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Most of existing works on applying game theories to security only consider two players in the security game model: an attacker and a defender. While this assumption may be valid for a network with centralized administration, it is not realistic in MANETs, where centralized administration is not available. In this paper, using recent advances in mean field game theory, we propose a novel game theoretic approach with multiple players for security in MANETs. The mean field game theory provides a powerful mathematical tool for problems with a large number of players. The proposed scheme can enable an individual node in MANETs to make strategic security defence decisions without centralized administration. In addition, since security defence mechanisms consume precious system resources (e.g., energy), the proposed scheme considers not only the security requirement of MANETs but also the system resources. Moreover, each node in the proposed scheme only needs to know its own state information and the aggregate effect of the other nodes in the MANET. Therefore, the proposed scheme is a fully distributed scheme. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.