A dynamic trust updating model based on multiple constraints in wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Due to their distributed nature, wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are vulnerable to various attacks, resulting in untrusted communications. To achieve trusted communications, it is important to build a trust model for executions in a self-organizing and decentralized network environment. However, due to high dynamic and low stability of the nodes, such model is difficult to build for WMNs. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic trust updating model (DTUM) in WMNs, taking into consideration of multiple constraints. Our contributions are in two folds: (1) to ensure that the increase of trust should be slow and the drop of trust should be fast, similar to the trust building process in the real human society; (2) to ensure that the trust fades with time, describing the nature of trust. The effectiveness of our approach is validated through quantitative evaluation analysis.