A Situational Awareness Trust Evolution Model for Mobile Devices in D2D Communication

Device-to-device (D2D) communication is a promising concept for improving user experiences and resource utilization in cellular networks. This type of communication enables two or more mobile devices in proximity to establish local links, coordinated by a base station, to perform direct data exchange. The benefits of D2D communication include ubiquitous computing and communication, enhanced energy efficiency, creation of new services, and so on. However, how to establish the trust relationship between two devices is a base problem that should be solved. In this paper, we propose a situational awareness trust evolution model for mobile devices involved in D2D communication. Compared with available trust evaluation schemes, we consider the comprehensive situation that a mobile device may encounter. We use what a device wants and what it can obtain to depict the situation of the device when given a concrete interaction (transaction). We give the method to get quantitative description of such information, and then the coefficients of the new proposed trust evolution function can be determined. To demonstrate the efficiency of our method, we conduct some experiments to show the properties of our method, and the results show that our trust evolution scheme is consistent with the intuition about trust in real life. Furthermore, we compare our scheme with two state-of-the-art dynamic trust evaluation schemes in different usage scenarios of mobile devices. The results show that our scheme can perform well in all scenarios, whereas the other two schemes can perform well only in some of the tested scenarios.