Effect of User Mobility upon Trust Building among Autonomous Content Routers in an Information‐Centric Network

Abstract

The capability of proactive in-network caching and sharing of content is one of the most important features of an information-centric network (ICN). We describe an ICN model featuring autonomous agents controlling the content routers. Such agents are unlikely to share cached content with other agents without an incentive to do so. To stimulate cooperation between agents, we adopt a reputation and trust building scheme that is able to explicitly account for both objective current content availability and subjective willingness to cooperate. The scheme is further complemented with a so-called one-time goodwill mechanism introduced to avoid penalizing agents failures to provide temporarily unavailable content. In a simulated ICN environment under a modified Random Waypoint user mobility model, we investigate the resiliency of the reputation and trust building scheme to subversion, that is, strategic (selfish or malicious) agents acquiring higher trust values than honest ones, for varying user mobility scenarios. The scheme proves resilient in low-mobility scenarios, while increased user mobility is shown to have a negative effect. The one-time goodwill mechanism partly remedies this for high-mobility scenarios. We validate the results by comparison with an existing reputation and trust building scheme and with an alternative user mobility model.