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Abstract A trust management mechanism for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is proposed to cope with security issues that MANETs face due to time constraints as well as resource constraints in bandwidth, computational power, battery life, and unique wireless characteristics. The trust-based reputation scheme GlobalTrust is a reliable trust management mechanism. In this paper, a clustering algorithm is applied to the GlobalTrust scheme (named Cluster-based GlobalTrust (CGTrust)) to find the optimal group size to minimize the configuration time, which consists of trust information computational time and complexity, while having to satisfy the trust reliability requirements. The optimal number of clusters is derived from the minimizing point of the computation complexity function. Simulation results show that the computational time and complexity of CGTrust are controllable and can be used effectively in time critical network operations that require trust analysis.