Trust Management and Modeling Techniques in Wireless Communications

Introduction

In the recent years, trust is a topic of importance in many disciplines like computer science, wireless communications and Cognitive Sciences. Trust is defined as the belief over another person that he will behave according to an established pattern of rules. The multiagent system researchers introduced the concept of trust in computer science. These intelligent agents interact with each other and try to emulate the trust observed in human societies. Hence, trust has become an integral part of human lives and it was found to be an effective security mechanism for open environments like Internet. Considerable research has been done on modeling and managing trust and reputation in distributed systems

The definition of social trust was given by Diego Gambetta where trust is a particular level of subjective probability with which an agent will perform a particular action, independently of whether he is monitored or not. The notion of trust and reputation systems originate from the study of social sciences where the dynamics of trust in human societies are studied (Yu, Shen, Miao, Leung, & Niyato, 2010)(Abdul-Rahman & Hailes, 2000) (Misztal, 1995). Researchers in the field of distributed systems have shown that trust and reputation management schemes can be effectively used to improve security (English, Nixon, Terzis, McGettrick, & Lowe, 2002) and aid in decision-making process. Hence, trust based systems can be used as a comprehensive security tool in addition to cryptographic mechanisms. The properties of trust are discussed by many researchers (Josang & Ismail, 2002; Misztal, 1995).They are summarized as follows.