Enabling Fast Bootstrap of Reputation in P2P Mobile Networks

The easy deployment of P2P self-organized systems has contributed to their wide diffusion and to the definition of a new communication paradigm. Mobile communities can now spontaneously emerge to enable users to become both consumer and service providers. However, the presence of selfish and malicious nodes can thwart the sustainability of these systems as nodes try to exploit services without contributing resources. In these P2P systems reputation management schemes can promote collaboration, but they are mostly ineffective in communities that last for short time.In this paper we propose a token based mechanism that extends existing reputation management schemes to support mobility. It reduces the problem of bootstrapping the reputation values and provides incentives for nodes to properly behave. Simulation results show that the token based extension enables the correlation of transactions in different contexts efficiently.