An Ontology Based Trust Framework for Sensor-Driven Pervasive Environment

Pervasive computing is an environment consisting set of sensor nodes with the characteristics of perception, computation and communication capabilities. Wireless sensor nodes are deployed in various pervasive computing applications to observe the happenings in the surroundings. Data gathered from such wireless sensor nodes are utilized for critical decision making in context-aware environment. The Frequent incorrect data sampling, missing values, untrustworthy data, misbehavior and selfishness of nodes are common in pervasive applications since they are deployed in unfriendly and harsh environment. Moreover, the increasing number of sensor node fabricator leads to interoperability problems in context aware pervasive applications because they are represented in different formats and processed using different techniques. In this paper, we propose an ontology based trust framework for sensor driven pervasive environment for evaluating node and data trustworthiness which suffers from heterogeneity and interoperability problems. The proposed approach is capable of handling all types of nodes in pervasive environment and heterogeneous data generated from harsh and unfriendly environments of context aware pervasive applications. The proposed method comprises of semantic sensor data model and an ontology which is written in OWL language and implemented in protege. The proposed ontology is validated against use case and used for finding the trustworthiness of different sensor nodes and its data using a generic TRUST ontology.