Reputation management: experiments on the robustness of ROCQ

In order for autonomic systems to function, the individual components must co-operate and not indulge in malicious behavior. However, it is almost certain that autonomous systems in Next Generation Networks will inadvertently include less than trustworthy components. Identifying such entities is critical to the smooth and effective functioning. We present new experiments conducted with the ROCQ scheme, a reputation-based trust management system that computes the trustworthiness of peers on the basis of transaction-based feedback. The ROCQ model combines four parameters: Reputation (R) or a peer's global trust rating, Opinion (O) formed by a peer's first-hand interactions, Credibility (C) of a reporting peer and Quality (Q) or the confidence a reporting peer puts on the feedback it provides. In this paper, we demonstrate that ROCQ is robust against churn and also examine the effect of credibility and quality on the performance of the scheme. © 2005 IEEE.