A Reputation Management Framework for MANETs

Resistance to malicious attacks and assessment of the trust value of nodes are important aspects of trusted mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), and it is therefore necessary to establish an effective reputation management system. Previous studies have relied on the direct monitoring of nodes, recommendations from neighbors or a combination of these two methods to calculate a reputation value. However, these models can neither collect trust information effectively, nor cooperate to resist an attack, instead increasing the network load. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a novel reputation management framework that collects trust information and calculates the reputation value of nodes by selecting special nodes as management nodes. This framework can effectively identify malicious information and improve the credibility of a reputation value.