Decentralized Self-management of Trust for Mobile Ad Hoc Social Networks

The construction of social networks over mobile devices in the events or at locations has emerged as a new network paradigm. These new mobile social networks enable people to communicate and share their experiences without the need to have Internet access and with minimum required infrastructure. However, the functionality and security of such networks would be potentially undermined without an effective trust management scheme. Although many trust management systems have been proposed, few of them can be applied to these new mobile social networks because of the unique network and communication characteristics. This paper presents a novel trust management system, termed MobileTrust, to establish decentralized, secure and reliable trust relationships between mobile ad hoc social network participants. Specifically, the construction of trust models encompasses both scenarios that users are experienced with the network and users are unacquainted with the environment. The trust models cover various important factors of trust relationships in social networks, including the similarity of user profile, reputation, and history of friendship. A set of simulations is conducted to evaluate our system deployed in a mobile social network in the presence of dishonest users.