Trust and Mobility aware Service Provision for Pervasive Computing
Liam McNamara, Cecilia Mascolo, Licia Capra · 2006
Abstract. Successful provision of services in pervasive networks represents a major challenge. The requester of a service or resource should be able to decide whom to rely on, not simply based on the apparent QoS that various providers offer, but also based on the trustworthiness of the providers, as well as their mobility patterns. Existing approaches offer a rather simplistic solution to the problem: either resources and services are discovered and selected purely based on their name/category, or at most by looking at the QoS promised by the various providers. However, there is no guarantee for the client that the provider will indeed deliver the advertised QoS; moreover, given the dynamicity of the pervasive setting, there is no guarantee that the selected provider will be available to the requester for the duration of the service. In this paper we present a service provision framework that reasons about mobility and trust to enable effective service selection in mobile ad-hoc networks. We illustrate our ideas through a scenario of service sharing on public transport where passengers are able to select other passenger’s devices for information transfer, based on a novel combination of quality attributes (e.g., network connectivity), trust and mobility. 1