Performance evaluation of a self-evolving trust building framework

A self-evolving reputation scheme for trust establishment in distributed peer networks is presented and evaluated. The framework, called ad-hoc trust framework (ATF), incorporates subjective behavior of end-users, direct observations of behaviors, recommendations, and history of evidences to assess the trustworthiness of peer entities. It considers several idiosyncrasies of the wireless self-organized networks, such as lack of computational resources. ATF is associated with a generic model for the evaluation of the trustworthiness of adjacent or distant nodes. It relies on a sophisticated reputation method, called trustspan, to contact only trusted peers for recommendations, and, thus, it minimizes communication costs for trust building, accelerating the trust evolution process. To evaluate the performance of the ATF framework we have deployed a large number of simulation scenarios. The performance assessment results show that ATF achieves to rapidly identify selfish nodes with high accuracy, and with relatively low communication costs.