User feature-aware trustworthiness measurement of cloud services via evidence synthesis for potential users

Abstract

Cloud computing can provide elastic and dynamic resources on demand, which facilitates service providers to make profits resulting from the long tail effect. It becomes vitally important to ensure that cloud services can be acceptable to more potential users. However, it is challenging for potential users to discover the trustworthy cloud services due to the deficiency of usage experiences and the information overload of QoE (quality of experience) evaluations from consumers. This paper presents a user feature-aware trustworthiness measurement approach for potential users. In this approach, the influence factors of QoE are systematically analyzed based on the user feature model and the quantitative computation methods are designed to measure the user feature similarity. In addition, employing FAHP (fuzzy analytic hierarchy process) method identifies the user feature community. To enhance the accuracy of trustworthiness measurement, the false evidences in QoE evaluations are iteratively filtered out with dynamic mean distance threshold. Finally, the trustworthiness of service is measured via evidence synthesis combining user feature similarity. The experiments show that this approach is effective to improve the quality of trustworthiness measurement, which is helpful to solve information overload problem and cold start problem of trusted service recommendation for potential users.