Title: Mitigating the effect of free riders in distributed systems: a trust-based approach

Authors: Farag Azzedin

Addresses: Information and Computer Science Department, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran 31261, Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia

Abstract: Distributed systems such as the grid, the cloud, and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) often involve cooperation and consequently require secure resource sharing across organisational boundaries. This adds an extra overhead that might negate the benefits of using these systems. WSNs and P2P services have similar underlying technologies and similar applications. One major problem hindering the success of these ubiquitous services is free riding. Many free riding algorithms proposed in the literature assume that all sensors are honest and collusion-free. These assumptions do not hold in environments such as WSNs and P2P, where autonomy and public subscription are key attributes. In this paper, we propose a free riding mitigation algorithm to countermeasure two types of attacks, namely dishonesty and collusion. We also conduct extensive experiments to evaluate our proposed solution.

Keywords: WSNs; wireless sensor networks; distributed systems; trust; P2P; peer-to-peer; free riders; free riding algorithms; dishonesty attacks; collusion attacks; network security; resource sharing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2016.080375

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2016 Vol.22 No.4, pp.248 - 258

Received: 19 Mar 2013
Accepted: 26 Dec 2013

Published online: 18 Nov 2016 *

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