Dispositional Trust Adaptation in User-Centric Networks

Wireless networks today are partially being formed by nodes (e.g. Internet access points, smartphones, femtocells)that are owned and carried by humans. In such scenarios where several strangers are expected to interact for the sake of robust data transmission, trust and reputation are of vital importance. As such, User Centric Networks require well-defined trust metrics in order to ensure the robustness and reliability of the overall system. Dispositional Trust (DT) is defined as the general willingness of a given user/entity to trust others and it is used in many trust metrics as part of the threshold under which an entity will not trust another. In this paper we propose that dispositional trust should not be a static value and that it should change and self-adapt depending on the surrounding environment and context, in order for the overall trust metric to be more robust and to be able to converge faster to realistic trust measurements regarding the other surrounding entities in the system. To prove our statement, we compare other trust metrics with the one we propose in a simulated environment, in order to quantitatively assess whether our dispositional trust self-adaptation makes a difference in the robustness of the metric while maintaining when possible the network utility.