cTrust: Trust Aggregation in Cyclic Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In a Cyclic Mobile Ad Hoc Network (CMANET) where nodes move cyclically, we formulate trust management problems and propose the cTrust scheme to handle trust establishment and aggregation issues. Unlike trust management in conventional peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, trust management in MANETs is based on simple neighbor trust relationships and also location and time dependent. In this paper, we focus on trust management problem in highly mobility environment. We model trust relations as a trust graph in CMANET to enhance accuracy and efficiency of trust establishment among peers. Leveraging a stochastic distributed Bellman-Ford based algorithm for fast and lightweight aggregation of trust scores, the cTrust scheme is a decentralized and selfconfigurable trust aggregation scheme. We use the NUS student contact patterns derived from campus schedules as our CMANET communication model. The analysis and simulation results demonstrate the efficiency, accuracy, scalability of the cTrust scheme. With increasing scales of ad hoc networks and complexities of trust topologies, cTrust scales well with marginal overheads.