TRECON: A Trust-Based Economic Framework for Efficient Internet Routing

The fragility and the poor resilience of the Internet are manifested by the severe impact of network activities and the slow recovery after an earthquake damaged undersea cables and disrupted telephone and Internet access in East Asia in December 2006. Except the inefficiency of routing protocols, lack of efficient network monitoring mechanisms and lack of economic incentives to encourage service providers (SPs) to act cooperatively and promptly are other important reasons. In this paper, we build a trust-based economic framework called TRECON to address these open problems in Internet routing. The novelty of TRECON is combining an adaptive personalized trust model with an economic approach to provide independent trust-based routing among SPs. TRECON provides flexible policy support based on the trust-based economic mechanism so that autonomous organizations with varied interests and optimization criteria can be smoothly integrated together to achieve better adaptiveness and self-management. Through introducing the economic model, TRECON explores a new way to solve the economic problems and incentives issues in the collaboration among SPs. To show the flexibility of routing policies support, we propose four typical routing policies under the TRECON framework. We evaluate our approach by comparing these four trust-derived routing policies with the classical global shortest path routing approach. We find that the policy based on trustworthiness performs much better than all other policies under different network topologies in terms of delay, success delivery rate, and economic effects.