Establishing trust in decentralized smart sensor networks

Smart sensors can gather all kind of information and process it. Cameras are still dominating and smart cameras can offer services for face recognition or person tracking. Operators are building collaborations to cover a larger area, to save costs and to add more and different sensors. Cryptographic methods may achieve integrity and confidentiality between operators, but not trust. Even if a partner or one of his sensors is authenticated, no statements can be made about the quality of the sensor data. Hence, trust must be established between the partners and their sensors. Trust can be built based on past experience. A reputation system collects opinions of operators about the behavior of sensors and calculates trust based on these opinions. Many reputation systems have been proposed, e. g., for authentication of files in peer-to-peer networks. This work presents a new reputation system, which is designed to calculate the trustworthiness of smart sensors and smart sensor systems. A new trust model, including functions to calculate and update trust on past experiences, is proposed. When fusing information of multiple sensors, it cannot always be reconstructed, which information led to a bad result. Hence, an approach for fair rating is shown. The proposed system has been realized in a Service-Oriented Architecture for easy integration in existing smart sensor systems, e. g., smart surveillance systems. The model itself can be used in every decentralized heterogeneous smart sensor network.