Reputation in peer-to-peer communication

Trust between two communicating peers is increasingly catching the attention of the research community. Several trust models and trust management protocols have been proposed to assist the task of establishing trust between two communicating peers. All the proposed trust models make use of reputation mechanisms in order to establish trust between the two communicating peers. There is, however, less literature in the field that defines concepts related to reputation of peers in peer-to-peer communication. In this paper, we propose a definition of reputation that is more relevant to peer-to-peer communication. We evaluate our definition with the other existing definitions of reputation. Additionally, we propose and discuss the various characteristics of reputation.