Node Trust Assessment and Prediction in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

There is an inherent reliance on collaboration among the participants of mobile ad hoc networks in order to achieve the aimed functionalities. Collaboration is productive only if all participants operate in an honest manner. However, this is not always the case and these networks are subjected to a variety of malicious attacks. One of the key factors to ensure high communication quality is an efficient assessment scheme for node's prediction trust, to choose potential cooperative nodes and reduce the probability of risk occurrence for next interaction. In this paper, firstly we propose a node's trust assessment model based on node's historical behaviors, in which the trust decision factors include the subjective reputation and indirect reputation. Then we try to combine an improved grey model with the Markov chain together to effectively predict the node's trust. Experiment has been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism.