Study on trust inference and emergence of economical small-world phenomena in P2P environment

With the increasing popularity of self-organized communication systems, distributed trust and reputation systems in particular have received increasing attention. By formalizing trust relationships, trust between parties within the community can be derived by analyzing the trust paths linking the parties together. This paper treats trust network as an emergent property. The emergence interpretation concerns both the maintenance and usage of trust network inference. Specifically, in P2P system, trust network is maintained by individual agents at micro level, and it is used (i.e., queried) as one entity at macro level. In this paper, we first discuss micro level activities, that is, we classifies trust into functional trust and referral trust to facilitate trust inference, and extend the referral trust to include factors of similarity and truthfulness, so that our approach can accommodate the personalized feature of reputation rating, and reduce trust inference error effectively; then we discuss macro level properties of trust network. Specifically, we investigate the emergence of network structural properties of trust and reputation system in terms of efficiency and cost. That is, efficiency measures how well information propagates over trust system, and cost measures how expensive it is to build this system. Preliminary simulation results show the performance improvement of P2P community and the emergence of economical small-world trust network, namely relatively high efficiency and low cost.