An incentive compatible reputation mechanism for ubiquitous computing environments

The vision of ubiquitous computing is becoming a reality thanks to the advent of portable devices and the advances in wireless networking technologies. It aims to facilitate user tasks through seamless utilization of services available in the surrounding environments. In such distributed environments featuring openness, interactions such as service provision and consumption between entities that are unknown or barely known to each other, are commonplace. Trust management through reputation mechanism for facilitating such interactions is recognized as an important element of ubiquitous computing. It is, however, faced by the problems of how to stimulate reputation information sharing and enforce honest recommendation elicitation. We present in this paper an incentive compatible reputation mechanism to facilitate the trustworthiness evaluation of entities in ubiquitous computing environments. It is based on probability theory and supports reputation evolution and propagation. Our reputation mechanism not only shows robustness against lies, but also stimulates honest and active recommendations. The latter is realized by ensuring that active and honest recommenders, compared to inactive or dishonest ones, can obtain the most number of honest (helpful) recommendations and thus suffer the least number of wrong trust decisions, as validated by simulation based evaluation. The proposed reputation mechanism is also implemented as part of a QoS-aware Web service discovery middleware and evaluated regarding its overhead on service discovery latency.