Resources-aware trusted node selection for content distribution in mobile ad hoc networks

We propose a novel trust and probabilistic node selection mechanism for content distribution in mobile ad hoc networks. Due to the open nature of such networks which as a rule do not have strict node membership control, the selection of trustworthy nodes is an important challenge, especially as the resources (e.g., battery, bandwidth) of the mobile devices are limited and should not be wasted on erroneous or malicious content. Our proposal, in addition to considering the trustworthiness of nodes, ensures that the traffic load is equally shared amongst the population of nodes, thus further conserving mobile node resources. We analyse the proposed mechanisms and evaluate it against selected previously proposed trust schemes which, in the majority, favour the selection of the most trustworthy node. We demonstrate the benefits of our proposal which provides load balancing and prevents overuse of a single node’s resources, while still providing a good performance in regards to accurately choosing trustworthy nodes to provide the required content.