An Evaluation of Cluster Head TA Distribution Mechanisms in Tactical MANET Environments

Trust authority (TA) services are both impor- tant infrastructure services for layered protocols requiring the availability of an identification and authentication mechanism such as access control mechanisms and confi- dentiality services, and can also be viewed as exemplars for the secure and efficient distribution of computations in general. While such general problems have been stud- ied extensively, tactical MANET environments impose a number of requirements and constraints such as RF range and cost, battery limitations, and computational capabilities which call for more specific approaches. In this paper we report the analysis of algorithms for TA service distribution based on cluster head algorithms and improvements on the basic algorithms based on the specific requirements as identified in the course of simulations of tactical scenarios and realizing appreciable increases in efficiency over the general case in the process.