Social principles in agent-based trust management for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things has the potential to change our daily life. It will create a world where everyone and everything will be connected and knowledge will be diffused in every direction. This open, distributed and heterogeneous environment raises important challenges, such as intelligence and trustworthiness. Intelligent Agents are considered as a technology that can deal with these issues, since they are capable of autonomously representing people, devices or services while a wide range of trust and reputation models have already been proposed. This paper reports on identifying and incorporating social parameters involved in the Internet of Things, although it is not considered as a social network, with the use of Intelligent Agents enabling trustworthiness in the environment. More specifically, two paradigms, social graphs and peer-to-peer networks will be discussed while a novel distributed mechanism for locating reliable reports, an important aspect of reputation trust models will be proposed. Finally, a use case scenario is presented that illustrates the viability of the proposed approach.