Mission-Dependent Trust Management in Heterogeneous Military Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Managing trust in a tactical Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is challenging when collaboration or cooperation is critical to achieving military missions and system goals. Further, in heterogeneous MANETs, evaluating the trust level of a mission-driven group communication system accurately and identifying well-qualified nodes to perform a given mission are also crucial for successful mission completion. Some nodes will be highly qualified to perform the mission while others will not be, depending on the mission. Based on the context-dependent characteristic of trust, we propose a mission-dependent trust management protocol that dynamically evaluates the trust values of nodes, and dynamically recomposes the mission team so as to maximize the mission success probability. We develop a composite trust metric that considers aspects of QoS trust derived from communication networks and social trust derived from social and cognitive networks. We show that the proposed mission-dependent trust management protocol outperforms a unified trust management protocol which is not customized for performing a particular mission.