Recommendation Based Trust Model with an Effective Defence Scheme for MANETs

The reliability of delivering packets through multi-hop intermediate nodes is a significant issue in the mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The distributed mobile nodes establish connections to form the MANET, which may include selfish and misbehaving nodes. Recommendation based trust management has been proposed in the literature as a mechanism to filter out the misbehaving nodes while searching for a packet delivery route. However, building a trust model that relies on the recommendations from other nodes in the network is vulnerable to the possible dishonest behaviour, such as bad-mouthing, ballot-stuffing, and collusion, of the recommending nodes. . This paper investigates the problems of attacks posed by misbehaving nodes while propagating recommendations in the existing trust models. We propose a recommendation based trust model with a defence scheme that utilises clustering technique to dynamically filter attacks related to dishonest recommendations within certain time based on number of interactions, compatibility of information and node closeness. The model is empirically tested in several mobile and disconnected topologies in which nodes experience changes in their neighbourhoods and consequently face frequent route changes. The empirical analysis demonstrates robustness and accuracy of the trust model in a dynamic MANET environment.