A Trust Routing for Multimedia Social Networks

Due to the disconnected and store-and-forward architecture in multimedia social networks (MSNs), routing becomes a great challenge with the frequent path disruptions. Moreover, some nodes in MSNs tend to be selfish or malicious, e.g. they sometimes will not forward packets for other nodes or will launch passive and active attacks in order to save their limited resources such as bandwidth, battery or storage. In order to address this issue, we propose a fuzzy-based trust management technique for context-based routing in MSNs. We incorporate social trust metrics and quality of service metrics into our trust model. By adopting fuzzy sets, every node can evaluate the credibility of other nodes based on the direct and indirect relationship. By ranking all its neighbors according to the trust values, each node can purge untrustworthy nodes. Since only trusted nodes’ packets will be forwarded, the selfish or malicious nodes have the incentive to behave well again in order to be able to send packets. Additionally, we perform extensive security and performance evaluation with the opportunistic network environment simulator. The simulation results show that our trust model can dynamically update the trust value in real time, effectively measure the trust relationship and correctly identify malicious or selfish nodes. Furthermore, the proposed trust routing is a lightweight protocol balancing the message overhead and delivery ratio.