Uncertainty Modeling and Reduction 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 ignoring 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, they define a new uncertainty model to directly reflect a node's confidence in the sufficiency of its past experience, and study how the collection of trust information affects uncertainty in nodes' opinions.