Scalable, adaptive and survivable trust management for community of interest based Internet of Things systems

An Internet of Things (IoT) system connects a large amount of tags, sensors, and mobile devices to facilitate information sharing, enabling a variety of attractive applications. It challenges the design and evaluation of IoT systems to meet the scalability, compatibility, extendibility, dynamic adaptability and resiliency requirements. In this paper, we design and evaluate a scalable, adaptive and survivable trust management protocol in dynamic IoT environments. Recognizing that entities in an IoT system are connected through social networks of entity owners, we consider a community of interest (CoI) based social IoT where nodes form into communities of interest. Given inter-CoI vs. intra-CoI social connections among entity owners as input, we identify best trust protocol settings for achieving convergence, accuracy, dynamic adaptability and resiliency properties in the presence of dynamically changing conditions and malicious nodes performing trust-related attacks. For scalability, we consider a design by which a node only keeps trust information of a subset of nodes meeting its interest and performs minimum computation to update trust. We validate our design by extensive simulation considering both limited and ideal (unlimited) storage space. The results demonstrate that our trust management protocol using limited storage space achieves a similar performance level compared with the one under ideal storage space, and a newly joining node can quickly build up trust towards other nodes with desirable accuracy and convergence behavior.