Blockchain-Based Lightweight Trust Management in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Abstract

As a trending and interesting research topic, in recent years, researchers have been adopting the blockchain in the wireless ad-hoc environment. Owing to its strong characteristics, such as consensus, immutability, finality, and provenance, the blockchain is utilized not only as a secure data storage for critical data but also as a platform that facilitates the trustless exchange of data between independent parties. However, the main challenge of blockchain application in an ad-hoc network is which kind of nodes should be involved in the validation process and how to adopt the heavy computational complexity of block validation appropriately while maintaining the genuine characteristics of a blockchain. In this paper, we propose the blockchain-based trust management system with a lightweight consensus algorithm in a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET). The proposed scheme provides the distributed trust framework for routing nodes in MANETs that is tamper-proof via blockchain. The optimized link state routing protocol (OLSR) is exploited as a representative protocol to embed the blockchain concept in MANETs. As a securely distributed and trusted platform, blockchain solves most of the security issues in the OLSR, in which every node is performing the security operation individually and in a repetitive manner. Additionally, using predefined principles, the routing nodes in the proposed scheme can collaborate to defend themselves from the attackers in the network. The experimental results show that the proposed consensus algorithm is suitable to be used in the resource-hungry MANET with reduced validation time and less overhead. Meanwhile, the attack detection overhead and time also decrease because the repetitivity of the process is reduced while providing a scalable and distributed trust among the routing nodes.

An Improved Harmony Search Algorithm for Proactive Routing Protocol in VANET

“…Each node can set up optimal routes (in terms of the number of hops) for all 1-hop and 2-hop neighbors by utilizing only the information obtained from the HELLO messages, even Journal of Advanced Transportation though link states need to be exchanged via TC messages with the remaining nodes in the network in case there are more distant nodes. Following the same example, in Figure 4, it can be seen that just A and D are in charge of sending TC messages and the nodes have to be selected as the MPR by at least one neighbor [8,9,[12][13][14]. Besides, the MPR selectors are the only ones that forward these, i.e., messages from D are forwarded by A since the former selects the latter as the MPR, and vice versa.…”

“…is is due to the existing OLSR protocol's inability to predict channel overload and sense channel conditions. To obtain better routing efficiency, the network has to gain some cognitive capacity that will allow it to select an optimal path that considers both the channel information and the link-state, thereby helping it overcome the problem of channel incapacity [13]. Hasan et al [24] attempted to improve the OLSR routing by utilizing cognitive processes that obtain and store knowledge on routing strategies to determine and select the most suitable route and channel for transmission.…”

When Data Fly: An Open Data Trading System in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

“…DLT enables the operation of highly available, tamper-resistant distributed databases (i.e., distributed ledgers) that are operated by distributed storage and computing devices (i.e., DLT nodes) [17]. DLT was used, for example, to support payments at low charge (e.g., [18,19]), to achieve independence from trusted third parties (e.g., [20,21]), and to achieve a high degree of openness of the data trading system (e.g., [22]). Despite the beneficial characteristics of DLT for data trading systems (e.g., low or even no transaction fees for payments and a high degree of openness), existing studies (e.g., [23,24]) show that several DLT characteristics are at odds with the characteristics of direct wireless ad hoc communication.…”

A Dynamic TDMA Scheduling Strategy for MANETs Based on Service Priority

“…[ 3 ], it has the characteristics of decentralization, infrastructure-less, self-organization, flexible networking and dynamic topology [ 4 , 5 ], which have made it be recognized as a promising network model that is widely used in the sensor and detection field [ 1 , 6 , 7 ], such as Internet of Things (IoT) [ 8 ], wireless sensor network (WSN) [ 9 ], unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm detection network [ 10 ] and tactical unmanned vehicle sensing system (UVSS) [ 11 , 12 ]. In these scenarios, with the limited network resources, various sensor nodes interact the perceived information with each other in a distributed multi-hop cooperative transmission manner [ 13 ]. To improve the network adaptability and quality of service (QoS), a reasonable resource scheduling strategy is needed for optimizing network resource use and resource allocation efficiency [ 14 , 15 ], which highlights the importance of the physical resource allocation strategy [ 16 ].…”