Multifaceted trust management framework based on a trust level agreement in a collaborative cloud

Cloud computing is an emerging field aimed at providing any type of service on demand-anywhere, and anytime. Advances in this field have facilitated a futuristic collaborative cloud in which many inter-connected clouds provide scalable services. A request processed by an untrustworthy provider can endanger quality of service, prompting the dissatisfaction of the customer. This paper aims to select the Trustworthy Service Provider (TSP) by evaluating trust based on in-context feedback from different sources; these sources include customer feedback, global advisory feedback and third-party feedback. Furthermore, unfair feedback is filtered to improve accuracy. Consequently, the job-success rate increases, and customers are able to obtain value-for-money for the sum paid toward selection of a provider. The present experimental work proves that the proposed model is effective and efficient in selecting a trustworthy provider in a collaborative environment. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.