Friendship Based Trust Model to Secure Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Trust management in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) has become a significant issue in securing routing protocols to choose reliable and trusted paths. Trust is used to cope with defection problems of nodes and stimulate them to cooperate. However, trust is a highly complex concept because of the subjective nature of trustworthiness, and has several social properties, due to its social origins. In this paper, a friendship-based trust model is proposed for MANETs to secure routing protocol from source to destination, in which multiple social degrees of friendships are introduced to represent the degree of nodes' trustworthiness. The model considers the behaviour of nodes as a human pattern to reflect the complexity of trust subjectivity and different views. More importantly, the model considers the dynamic differentiation of friendship degree over time, and utilises both direct and indirect friendship-based trust information. The model overcomes the limitation of neglecting the social behaviours of nodes when evaluating trustworthiness. The empirical analysis shows the greater robustness and accuracy of the trust model in a dynamic MANET environment.