Trust Management in Opportunistic Networks

The increase of people using mobile devices to perform their daily duties has leveraged a number of innovations in wireless network capabilities. Among these changes, there is the possibility of communication without the presence of a provider, based on the idea that opportunistic encounters and sharing between pairs of users can increase the availability of information and resources in an interactive system. During the opportunistic encounters, the users may have to analyze how reliable the other users are. To deal with the risks users may face out when they are interacting with each other, this work proposes a trust management system based on an ontology. The ontology uses a reputation system to classify how reliable a user is. A simple prototype is presented to show the system’s capabilities.