Constructing Trust Networks Based on Small-World Theories

Trust relationships between agents provide a strong foundation for realizing security in ubiquitous computing environments. This approach is inspired by real-life networks. Furthermore, many studies show that real-life networks have the ldquosmall-world phenomenonrdquo. Small-world networks are networks with high clustering and short average path length. These two properties often mean that we can easily find a short path between any two agents in such networks, which is an expected property of trust networks. In this paper, based on the existing small-world theories, we research how to construct a small-world trust network. Analyses demonstrate that the approach in this paper is efficient and effective.