The Effect of Rumor Spreading in Reputation Systems for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Mobile ad-hoc networks rely on the cooperation of nodes for routing and forwarding. For individual nodes there are however several advantages resulting from noncooperation, the most obvious being power saving. Nodes that act selfishly or even maliciously pose a threat to availability in mobile ad-hoc networks. Several approaches have been proposed to detect noncooperative nodes. In this paper, we investigate the effect of using rumors with respect to the detection time of misbehaved nodes as well as the robustness of the reputation system against wrong accusations. We propose a Bayesian approach for reputation representation, updates, and view integration. We also present a mechanism to detect and exclude potential lies. The simulation results indicate that by using this Bayesian approach, the reputation system is robust against slander while still benefitting from the speed-up in detection time provided by the use of rumors.