A Reputation Capital and Blockchain-based Model to Support Group Formation Processes in the Internet of Things

The “Internet of Things” (IoT) is requiring increasing computational capabilities which can be obtained from Machine-to-Machine cooperation among smart objects. The convergence of IoT and Multi-Agent Systems gives the opportunity to benefit of their social attitude to interact and cooperate for services. In a mobile and federated context, selecting reliable partners for cooperation is a complex task because the most part of devices are not referenced with respect to their trustworthiness. The aggregation of agents in groups, in each IoT environment, on the basis of reputation information can provide a solution to this problem. In order to spread device/agent reputation information in our distributed scenario without using a central repository, we propose to rely on the blockchain technology to support a reputation approach to form groups. In particular, information about the reputation capital, certified by the blockchain, is used by an algorithm to drive group formation processes of agents in IoT environments.