Trust-Based Service Composition and Binding for Tactical Networks with Multiple Objectives

Tactical networks must select service providers to meet service requirements of an operation while facing resource constraints and high security vulnerability. In such an environment nodes provide services to support various operations and/ may request services to support the operations as well. We formulate the problem of service composition and service binding as a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem, minimizing the service cost, while maximizing the quality of service (QoS) and quality of information (QoI). The MOO problem is essentially a node-to-service assignment problem such that by dynamically formulating service composition, and selecting the right nodes to provide requested services, the network can support concurrent operations while achieving multiple system objectives. We develop a trust-based service composition and binding protocol. We demonstrate that the trust-based scheme outperforms the counterpart non-trust-based scheme. Furthermore, our trust-based scheme can effectively penalize malicious nodes performing self-promotion attacks, thus filtering out malicious nodes and can ultimately lead to high user satisfaction.