An agent-based trust and reputation management scheme for wireless sensor networks

The operation of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is functionally affected by the selfish and/or malicious network nodes; and their resource constraints complicate the design of any WSN-based protocol and application. Rating nodes' trust and reputation have proven to be an effective solution to improve security, to support decision-making and to promote node collaboration in both wired and wireless networks. However, existing approaches to trust and reputation management emphasize mostly on trust and reputation modeling and ignore the overhead problems brought by their proposed schemes. In this paper, taking into consideration the power and bandwidth constraints of WSNs, we propose a novel agent-based trust and reputation management scheme (ATRM) from a system design point of view. Our objective is to manage trust and reputation with minimal overhead in terms of extra messages and time delay. The main contribution of our work is the introduction of a localized trust and reputation management strategy, which reduces both communication cost and acquisition latency.

1 Introduction

Trust is the degree of belief about the future behavior of other entities, which is based on the one's the past experience with and observation of their actions [1]; and its properties can be summarized as: subjectivity [2], non-transitivity [3], temporalness [4], contextualness and dynamicity as well as non-monotonicity [1]. Additionally, another characteristic of trust, unidirection, can be derived from subjectiveness and non-transitiveness. Reputation is another complex notion, which is quite different from but easily confused with trust. In a community, reputation of an entity is the global perception about the entity's behavior norms based on the trust that other entities hold in the entity [1], [5]. The characteristics of reputation include objectivity, temporalness, contextualness [6], and dynamicity as well as non-monotonicity. After Blaze, Feigenbaum, and Lacy formally introduced “trust management” as a separate component of security in network services and gave an overall definition of trust management problem in [7], a great deal of comprehensive research focusing especially on trust and reputation management follows. Research shows that rating nodes' trust and reputation is an effective approach in distributed environments to improve security [8], [9], to support decision-making [10], [11], and to promote node collaboration [12]. Nowadays, trust and reputation management is attracting more and more attention from researchers and becoming an essential part of many network-based applications.