Trust-based Task Assignment in Military Tactical Networks

Resource or task assignment problems have been studied extensively in military network environments as efficient and effective resource allocation is the key to successful mission completion. However, existing works on asset‐task assignment problems are based only on the best match between functionalities of a node and requirements of a task. We propose a composite trust based task assignment protocol where a task requires all members to have a specific trust level for successful mission completion while allowing each member to maximize its utility. The proposed protocol explores the tradeoff between trust and risk, and selects a best set of members for each task based on task specific trust requirements. We show that the proposed composite trust based task assignment protocol outperforms the non‐trust based counterpart in mission success ratio. Further, there exists an optimal acceptable risk level that can best balance meeting the condition of selecting a sufficient number of members for task execution while preserving qualified trustworthy nodes as task members to maximize the mission completion ratio.