TMETA: Trust Management for the Cold Start of IoT Services With Digital-Twin-Aided Blockchain

There is growing attention in the metaverse from a variety of fields, and many Internet of Things (IoT) companies are exploring the possibility of integrating their existing business into the metaverse space. However, it still remains challenging to put the metaverse into practice. Among those challenges, trust management is critical to guarantee secure interactions and effective sharing among metaverse assets. In this article, we construct a TMETA system as a pioneer work for further establishing the metaverse and utilizing digital assets, which helps IoT startup (IS) companies expand their business during the cold start phase with limited business knowledge and seed budget. In the TMETA system, IoT companies treat their interaction experience with resource providers (RPs) as digital assets. When an IS initiates IoT services with the assistance of expertise-diverse RPs, task assignments are determined by leveraging the knowledge and trustworthy advice of expert IoT companies. With the aid of digital twin (DT) and blockchain technology, IoT tasks will be assigned to their suitable RPs as the secured instruction from trust DTs of expert companies, which are evaluated and updated by trust evolution and advice aggregation. We demonstrate our proposed TMETA system’s practicability with synthetic and real-world data. The experimental results indicate that our proposed TMETA system can help ISs attain more favorable outcomes and reduce the task failure rate in various trust environments, thereby accelerating the cold start process.