A Novel Reputation Model Based on Subjective Logic for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

In mobile Ad hoc networks (MANETs), several nodes’ uncooperative behaviors would significantly affect the overall performance and the security of the networks. Reputation systems have been proved to be efficient to block such behaviors. However, they failed to resist the collusion attacks of malicious nodes. A novel reputation model based on subjective logic was proposed in this paper in order to detect malicious nodes efficiently even when they colluded to interfere with the reputation assistant mechanism. The concept of opinion distance was introduced to filter malicious recommendations so that the false accusations laid by malicious nodes would have little influence on the performance of the reputation model. Simulations were conducted to evaluate the proposed model on its performance. The results indicate that it performs much better than other similar models in detecting malicious nodes, especially when malicious colluding behaviors exist in the MANETs.

This work is partially sponsored by Doctoral Program Foundation for Institutions of Higher Education of China (No.200802130023) and Postdoctoral Foundation of Heilongjiang Province (LRB09-103).