A Bio-Inspired Trust Framework in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Cyber attacks are amongst the most serious threats facing people and organizations. In the face of the increasing complexity and effectiveness of these attacks, creative approaches to defense are required. Groups of insects survive due to their use of collaborative approaches with the unique ability to detect anomalies using primarily local data and very limited computational resources (i.e., limited brain power). These attributes are even more crucial for wireless ad hoc networks where the number of nodes and connections between those nodes are ephemeral. We propose a trust framework inspired by the detection mechanisms exhibited by bee swarms in which a wireless node can only observe and leverage the actions of their neighbors rather than the global knowledge of the network to make a decision. This leveraging of local knowledge is an important aspect of trust in wireless networks in which global state information is difficult to encapsulate. We also utilize models from binary voting to present a straightforward mathematical model for our bee-inspired trust framework in wireless ad hoc networks.