Mechanism Design Based Nodes Selection Model for Threshold Key Management in MANETs

The design of threshold based distributed Certification authority (CA) has been proposed to provide secure and efficient key management service in Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), but most of previous work ignore the efficiency and effectiveness and assuming there are always honest nodes performing the service. Focusing on developing a model to select a coalition of nodes dynamically and optimally to carry out the threshold key management service in MANETs, we formulate the dynamic nodes selection problem as combinatorial optimization problem, with the objectives of maximizing the success ratio of the service and minimizing the nodes' cost of security and energy, and then extend the payment structure of the classical Vickrey, Clarke and Groves (VCG) mechanism design framework to ensure truth-telling is the dominant strategy for any node in our scenario. Compared with existing works in the presence of selfish nodes, the proposed model enjoys an improvement of both the success ratio of key management service and lifetime of the network, and a reduction of both the cost of participating nodes and compromising probability of MANETs.