Exploring the trust management mechanism in self-organizing complex network based on game theory

Abstract

The trust management mechanism can used to establish cooperation relationship between nodes and decrease risk caused by the information interaction. In this paper, we propose a new trust management mechanism based on game theory to model the acquisition of indirect trust information between nodes, and put forward the corresponding punishment mechanism to enhance the cooperative behaviors. Moreover, single stage and repeated game model are established respectively to study the evolutionary stable strategy with different parameters, which illustrate the evolutionary selection process of node’s strategies in the indirect information assessment procedure. By the continuous adjustment of strategies, the whole network will converge to a stable state finally. The experiment results validate that the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed model, which can promote the cooperate behavior with the neighbor nodes to obtain the maximum benefit when facing the indirect information assessment. Furthermore, the stability of the trust management system can also be evaluated and enhanced, which help us to design the effective trust management mechanism in the real world.