Trust-Based Cooperative Action Control in Multi-agent Systems for Network Management

A mechanism to control cooperative actions in multi-agent systems for network management systems that consists of agents managed by different network management authorities (NMAs), such as ISPs and universities, is presented. In spite of cooperative work among NMAs being indispensable for Internet management, NMAs do not always trust or coordinate with each other because their intentions or policies may conflict. Therefore, in actual cases, cooperative work among NMAs is controlled with regard to the trustworthiness of the NMAs. Cooperative actions with no control may cause security problems, such as unintentional disclosure of network information. When a multi-agent system is deployed for network management, cooperative actions between agents must also be controlled in the same way as in actual network management. To achieve such control, our mechanism focuses on the trustworthiness of NMAs and controls cooperative actions on the basis of two parameters: (1) agent attributes and (2) reliability values. These parameters are referred or exchanged among the agents on an on-demand basis, and on their basis,the agents determine the availability of information of concern. Experimental results suggest that a network management system combined with our mechanism appropriately controls cooperative actions. These results demonstrate the feasibility of our basic design.