As a trending and interesting research topic, in recent years, researchers have been adopting the blockchain in the wireless ad-hoc environment. Owing to its strong characteristics, such as consensus, immutability, finality, and provenance, the blockchain is utilized not only as a secure data storage for critical data but also as a platform that facilitates the trustless exchange of data between independent parties. However, the main challenge of blockchain application in an ad-hoc network is which kind of nodes should be involved in the validation process and how to adopt the heavy computational complexity of block validation appropriately while maintaining the genuine characteristics of a blockchain. In this paper, we propose the blockchain-based trust management system with a lightweight consensus algorithm in a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET). The proposed scheme provides the distributed trust framework for routing nodes in MANETs that is tamper-proof via blockchain. The optimized link state routing protocol (OLSR) is exploited as a representative protocol to embed the blockchain concept in MANETs. As a securely distributed and trusted platform, blockchain solves most of the security issues in the OLSR, in which every node is performing the security operation individually and in a repetitive manner. Additionally, using predefined principles, the routing nodes in the proposed scheme can collaborate to defend themselves from the attackers in the network. The experimental results show that the proposed consensus algorithm is suitable to be used in the resource-hungry MANET with reduced validation time and less overhead. Meanwhile, the attack detection overhead and time also decrease because the repetitivity of the process is reduced while providing a scalable and distributed trust among the routing nodes.

中文翻译：

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移动自组网中基于区块链的轻量级信任管理。

近年来，作为一个趋势和有趣的研究主题，研究人员一直在无线临时环境中采用区块链。由于其强大的特性（例如共识性，不变性，最终性和出处），区块链不仅被用作关键数据的安全数据存储，而且还被用作促进独立各方之间不信任数据交换的平台。但是，自组织网络中区块链应用的主要挑战是验证过程中应涉及哪种节点以及如何在保持区块链真正特征的同时适当采用块验证的繁重计算复杂性。在本文中，我们提出了一种在移动自组织网络（MANET）中使用轻量级共识算法的基于区块链的信任管理系统。所提出的方案提供了用于在MANET中路由节点的分布式信任框架，该框架通过区块链来防篡改。优化的链接状态路由协议（OLSR）被用作代表协议，将区块链概念嵌入MANET中。作为安全分布式且受信任的平台，区块链解决了OLSR中的大多数安全问题，其中每个节点都以重复的方式分别执行安全操作。此外，使用预定义的原理，建议方案中的路由节点可以协作以防御网络中的攻击者。实验结果表明，该共识算法适用于资源匮乏的移动自组网，验证时间短，开销少。与此同时，