Towards a collaborative reputation based service provider selection in ubiquitous computing environments

From a market based perspective, entities composing dynamic ubiquitous computing environments may be classified into two main categories that are, in principle, in conflict. These are the Service Resource Requestors (SRRs) wishing to use services and/or exploit resources offered by other system entities and the Service Resource Providers (SRPs) that offer the services/resources requested. Under the assumption that a number of SRPs may handle the SRRs requests, the SRRs may decide on the most appropriate SRP for the service/resource requested on the basis of a weighted combination of the evaluation of the quality of their offer (performance related factor) and of their reputation rating (reliability related factor). In this context, a reputation mechanism is proposed, which rates SRPs with respect to whether they honoured or not the agreements they have established with the SRRs. The reputation mechanism is collaborative, distributed and robust against false and spurious ratings.