An Incentive Compatible Reputation Model for P2P Networks

An important challenge regarding peer's trust assessment in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks is how to cope with such issues as the fraudulent behaviors and the dishonest feedback behaviors from malicious peers, and the issue of inactive recommendations to others. However, these issues cannot be effectively addressed by the existing solutions. Thus, an incentive compatible reputation management model for P2P networks, named ICRM, is proposed to solve them. In ICRM, the metric of time zone is used to describe the time property of the transaction experience and the recommendation. Three other metrics such as the direct trust value, the recommendation trust value and the recommendation credibility, based on the metric of time zone are applied to express accurately the final trust level of a peer. Furthermore, the participating level is introduced as the metric to identify a peer's activeness degree. Theoretical analysis and simulation experiments demonstrate that, ICRM can effectively suppress the malicious behaviors such as providing unreliable services, or giving dishonest feedbacks to others in the P2P networks. What's more, it also can incent peers to offer recommendations to others more actively.