A Framework for Building Trust Based Communities in P2P Mobile Social Networks

Trust management in applications for peer-to-peer (P2P) mobile networks has recently gained enormous interests. In a P2P mobile social network, users interact with each other to share information without relying on a centralized infrastructure. Users with similar interests establish groups or communities thus encouraging sharing of information such as interest profiles, personal information, documents, audio or video files etc. Gaining membership in a group/community in a mobile social network is based on recommendation from a pre-existing member of a group; revoking membership of a user from a group could be a challenging task without the existence of a central authority. In contrast to the existing implementations of social networks based on a client/server paradigm, we propose a decentralized (P2P) framework for trusted information exchange and social interaction among users based on the Dynamicity Aware Graph Relabeling System (DA-GRS). The proposed framework utilizes a light weight trust model for identifying trustworthy users and aims at creating communities of trusted users while isolating and reducing interactions with untrustworthy users. Simulations in three different environments show the effectiveness of the framework compared to the original DA-GRS algorithm.