Extending trust management with cooperation incentives: a fully decentralized framework for user-centric network environments

Abstract

While trust management systems can be used in isolation in order to provide robustness to a given architecture, cooperation incentives can be used to complement and collaborate with trust management systems as users can benefit from them while using the system, thus encouraging user's good behaviour. We have designed a fully decentralized trust management and cooperation incentives framework for user-centric network environments composed by three main components, the identity manager, the trust manager and the cooperation manager. In this article, we present how we integrate our trust management and cooperation incentives framework with a collaborative wireless access sharing service, being the aim of the article to evaluate its feasibility from a bootstrapping and survivability point of view. Our results obtained through simulation prove that the values for bootstrapping and data depletion times are well inside acceptable ranges, given that the total user base for the framework in the world is big enough while using friend-of-a-friend chains.