Location Aware Clustering and Trust Management in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Properly clustering a Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is an efficient method to ensure optimal network resources exploitation. A lot of clustering schemes have been proposed, most of them suffering from the same drawback i.e., cluster lifetime instability due to the mobility of the nodes. In order to cope with this particular problem, along with trust issues that arise and have been partially investigated previously, we propose a time-optimized clustering scheme which improves the lifespan of the network clusters, thus leading to increased trust efficiency, since malicious nodes are easier to locate. The malicious node spotting is achieved by combining individual node observations, as well as the collective cluster trust estimation regarding the reputation vector of a specific node.