Mobility Reduces Uncertainty in MANETs

Evaluating and quantifying trust stimulates collaboration in Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs). Many existing reputation systems sharply divide the trust value into right or wrong, thus ignore another core dimension of trust: uncertainty. As uncertainty deeply impacts a node's anticipation of others' behavior and decisions during interaction, the authors include uncertainty in the reputation system. Specifically, the authors use an uncertainty metric to directly reflect a node's confidence in the sufficiency of its past experience, and study how the collection of trust information may affect uncertainty in nodes' opinions.