NTaaS: Network Trustworthiness as a Service

The Device-to-Device communication (D2D) is believed to be one of promising paradigm for 5G wireless communication networks. D2D networks are based on a distributed peer to peer (P2P) network architecture where the nodes are self-organized. Moreover, as the devices are controlled by humans, their behaviours become unpredictable. Trust and reputation management (TRM) emerges as a significant research problem to tackle the security issues in D2D networks. Recently, there is a rapid growth of literature related to TRM but mainly focus their attention on trust modelling and quantification, so as to effectively detect and avoid various malicious attacks or selfish behaviours. However, there are only very limited existing works on the impact of the underlying network structure on overlay dynamic trust behaviours. The network trust behaviour is not merely a function of trust modes, but also a network-wide activity. In this paper, we propose the concept of "Network-Trustworthiness-as-a-Service" (NTaaS) - a network trustworthiness evaluation framework for the trustworthiness of the networks from global point of view. We also evaluate the evaluation framework through a thorough simulation study comparing different network topologies. The study will validate the trustworthiness evaluation framework, and thus present a guideline to evaluate network trustworthiness and network structure optimisation.