Secure opinion sharing for reputation-based systems in mobile ad hoc networks

Due to the basic nature of mobile ad hoc networks, that is, infrastructure-less, it is prone to individual or collective misbehaviors by participating node(s). Participating nodes could act selfishly and does cause massive loss to network performance because of limited resources or belonging to a different administrative domain. Reputation-based solutions are widely used to mitigate selfishness. These solutions are to some extent depend on the feedback from participating nodes for any given node which required its secure exchange in an adverse environment. This paper introduces a secure opinion sharing based on network coding to ensure the effectiveness of any reputation against selfishness in an adverse environment. The proposed scheme addresses the threat to opinion exchange in any reputation-based solution with minor changes. In addition, it can be used to exchange secure data in an adverse environment, for example, virtual currency and feedback exchange for credit payment and game theory–based solutions, respectively. Simulation results proved that this scheme achieves excellent opinion exchange ratio, moderate delay, and affordable per cycle overhead.