Post date: Apr 15, 2015 10:02:57 PM
Within the context of User-centric Networking, distributed trust schemes are being considered as a way to assist in developing connectivity only between devices whose owners "trust" each other for the specific purpose of relaying some form of data. Such trust does not necessarily imply that users know each other; instead, it relates to social interaction and to the interests shared by familiar strangers, i.e., users that knowingly or unknowingly share some aspects of their daily routines (e.g. visiting the same coffee shop every Saturday morning). Hence, the user anonymity is kept, while social interaction metrics related to direct and non direct recommendations of nodes around, as well as to the trust openness of a user towards strangers assists in developing more robust connectivity links, in the sense that connectivity becomes intertwined with circles of trust that are built on-the-fly.
Previous work that SITI developed in the context of the European project ULOOP considers the partial integration of social trust schemes as a way to provide non-repudiation, while still mitigating attacks. By using such techniques, ULOOP provides a single-sign on approach that can assist in creating trusted communities of devices. We have shown that such communities can assist in non-repudiation as well as in providing better QoE, due to allowing fairness in multiple users transmission.
In PEOPLE, we are currently exploring an interdisciplinary approach to networking, by finding more realistic ways to explore aspects such as trust, a belief that is also dependent on cognitive aspects.
Related work:
Rute C. Sofia and Luis Amaral Lopes, Trust as a Fairness Parameter for Quality of Experience in Wireless networks, chapter III, pages 159-169, Springer, Lecture Notes in Social Networking, volume Contribution To Appear, 2014
Rute C. Sofia, Paulo Mendes, José Manuel Damásio, Sara Henriques, Fabio Giglietto, Erica Giambitto and Alessadro Bogliolo, Moving Towards a Socially-Driven Internet Architectural Design (2012), in: ACM SIGCOMM CCR Newsletter, 42:3