Title: A pyramidal trust computing model for peer-to-peer networks inspired from social network

Authors: Feng-Ming Liu, Yong-Sheng Ding, Zhi-Hua Hu

Addresses: College of Information Sciences and Technology, Donghua University, Shanghai 201620, China; School of Management and Economics, Shandong Normal University, Jinan 250014, China. ' College of Information Sciences and Technology and Engineering Research Center of Digitized Textile – Fashion Technology, Ministry of Education, Donghua University, Shanghai 201620, China ' College of Information Sciences and Technology, Donghua University, Shanghai 201620, China

Abstract: Trust is an important tool in human life to cope with the uncertainty caused by the free will of others. Uncertainty and uncontrollability are also important issues in peer-to-peer (P2P) environments. A computational model of trust and its implementation can alleviate this problem. In this paper, we design a pyramidal trust management (PTM) model inspired from some phenomena of social networks. First, we propose the algorithms for trustworthiness evaluation, trust community formation, and PTM. Then, we describe the system implementation to demonstrate how to derive the trust mechanisms enhanced security solutions for peers| protection and QoS of network. Finally, we demonstrate through simulation that there is a significant improvement in network performance by applying the proposed trust management architecture.

Keywords: peer-to-peer networks; P2P networks; social networks; trust management; trust community; pyramidal trust management; PTM; computational modelling; trustworthiness evaluation; simulation; network performance.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMIC.2011.037841

International Journal of Modelling, Identification and Control, 2011 Vol.12 No.1/2, pp.125 - 132

Published online: 21 Mar 2015 *

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