Soft-Computing Based Trust Management Framework for Group Key Management in MANETs

We can realize instant joint group communication by forming Mobile Ad Hoc Networks without demanding any pre-plan or pre-existing infrastructure setup. Conversely, the curbs of these networks such as unreliable wireless medium, unpredictable topology, no central administration, fuel the compulsion of a key based cryptographic algorithm to defend data traffic. In this perspective, substantial research work has been done in the last decade or so and ascertained that the trust based frameworks for group key management deliver superior performance than others. Since the nodes in ad hoc networks have limited computing resources, the overall performance of the system depends on how effectively and securely designed the system. This encourages us to work on a framework which consumes less computing power and also invulnerable to internal as well as external attacks. We propose a framework which reduces the network resource consumption for the trust request and collection using game theory concept. The energy of the wireless nodes are significantly saved by choosing the novel strategy called as finding optimal set of remote nodes to send the response for trust request using game theory. Choosing local optimal at each stage eventually leads to global optimal. Later, synthesize the collected trust and handle the attacks using fuzzy concept in order to get the degree of trustworthiness instead of binary classification. We prove with our simulation results that our proposed scheme reduces overhead of the network significantly while without compromising security aspects.