Evidence Based Trust Estimation Model for Cloud Computing Services

With growing acceptance of cloud environment, demand for cloud services based applications is rapidly increasing. Cloud environment is inherently distributed and highly dynamic. Usually, many cloud services having similar functionalities but varying performances are offered. This makes difficult for user to identify the appropriate cloud service. Consequently, trust assessment is becoming essential to locate and to continue using the suitable cloud service. Quality of Service (QoS) attributes are significant for trust assessment in cloud environment. These attributes are dynamically changing and are not considered by the traditional trust assessment approaches. Hence, these approaches are inadequate to withstand in cloud environment. This paper proposes an evidence based trust estimation model (EBTEM) for trust assessment of cloud services. EBTEM uses various attributes of cloud service as evidence factors. It performs adaptive trust computation, which is sensitive to changes in the service behavior. EBTEM also presents a method for dynamic trust prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms other models in respect of accuracy and efficiency.