A Reputation Evidence Distribution Algorithm for P2P Systems

Reputation management is a specific form of trust management. Reputation is measured from direct or indirect knowledge of previous interactions between nodes. Individual nodes can rely on their direct experiences or can obtain reputation information from other peers. Nodes can use this reputation information to distinguish good from bad service providers. However, due to the distributed topology of P2P networks and the lack of trusted third parties, obtaining reputation evidence for choosing the suitable peer to collaborate with is a difficult and challenging task. How to quickly and securely obtain reputation evidence for building trust relationships is a key problem. This paper presents an ant-based reputation evidence distribution algorithm, which realizes reputation evidence distribution in P2P systems by modeling the ants¿ behavior of looking for food. Theoretical analysis and simulations prove that it can enable node to obtain evidence information by choosing the optimal path, and it performs very well in P2P environment.