Research On Clique-based Reputation And Incentive Mechanism In Internet-based Virtual Computing Environment

Internet-based virtual computing environment (iVCE) is a new research approach to bring Internet from a "potential computing platform" to "trustworthy computing platform". iVCE aims to systematically provide harmoniously unified, secure, and transparent services to Internet applications by aggregating and integrally utilizing of widespread resources. Accommodating to the growing and autonomic nature of Internet resources, it has been recognized as an important way to aggregating and utilizing Internet resource that building self-organized iVCE by voluntary participating and autonomic coordinating of the user nodes. Meanwhile, researches on existing self-organizing systems such as P2P and Grid computing systems, discovered that the self-organized system is being burdened with serious trustworthiness problems. For example, free-riding, bandwidth abusing, unreliable service and adversarial attacks on trustworthiness assurance system, have resulted in the lose of the self-organized systems, and brings up huge threats on the system development. Hence, in the study of self-organizing iVCE, it's very an important issue to build effective mechanisms which encourage progressive contribution and reliable service as well as curb and diminish the influences of untrusted behaviors in self-organizing environments.In this paper, we firstly study and analysis the characteristic of harmful behavior of autonomic element (AE), conception of reputation and issues on incentive mechanism design. After that, we give a brief survey of existing researches on reputation and incentive mechanism. By borrowing some ideas of social organization construction and evolution, we propose a new reputation system for the self-organizing iVCE, namely, clique-based reputation system (CRS) and study the key issues within it, from reputation model, reputation-based incentive, distributed reputation information management to application of reputation system within certain iVCE. Compared with existing researches on reputation systems, CRS makes many evident progresses from convergence of the reputation model, reasonableness of reputation evaluation, the self-enforcing incentive to the dependable distributed reputation management. The main contribution of this paper is detailed as follow:(1) On reputation model.Based on the clique structure of AEs, we propose a clique-based global reputation model CRep (Clique-based Reputation) and its extensive model CRep-R (CRep for Ram) for memory sharing application. Both CRep and CRep-R have the following properties: maintain the convergence of reputation solution without the introduction of the pre-trusted nodes; evident enhancement on the recognition capacity for different kinds of AEs; decrease the complexity of globally reputation evaluation; maintain robustness to certain kinds of adversarial behavior such as collusion and strategical attacks on clique-based reputation.(2) On reputation-based incentive.Based on the clique-based reputation models above, we proposed incentive mechanisms based on Reputation Inspired Clique evolution mechanism (RICE) and Clique Reputation-based two Level Service Searching (CR2SSS). Along with the evolution of cliques, AEs will be clustered in respect with different reputation values. More reputable AEs will always have better position under clique topology, and the less ones will be isolated on the edge. CR2SSS makes a different broadcast coverage for different reputable AEs. By making use of the clique topology structure, the more reputable AEs will get better services with respect to the broadcast coverage, the searching efficiency and the service reliability than the less ones. Combination of RICE and CR2SSS makes effective incentives to the contributing behaviors of the AEs. and it's incentive compatible with the design goals of our reputation system.(3) On distributed reputation information management.Based on the survey of the existing distributed reputation information management mechanisms, we proposed an efficient and dependable distributed reputation information management mechanism—RepMan. By the combination of DHT based distributed reputation information management and the public key based securing scheme, RepMan not only provides security, reliability, accountability assurance on the gathering, storing, transforming and using of the reputation information, but also makes the management and the maintenance of the reputation system very efficient. The analysis and simulation on some typical adversarial behaviors against reputation systems shows that, by incorporating with RepMan, CRS will be more resistant to varied attacks and it makes CRS a more practical reputation system under distributed environment.(4) CRS design for ram sharing application.Along with the study of a typical application of self-organizing iVCE—memory sharing environment iVCE4Memory, by analyzing the trustworthiness problem of iVCE4Memory and the characteristic of the services within it, we proposed an extension of CRS for iVCE4Memory, namely, CRS-R (CRS for Ram). CRS-R introduce the trustable evolution model and the contribution model for ram service. By extending the mechanisms of iVCE4Memory, we proposed an negotiation-based service appointment mechanism. By simulatiing, we found that CRS-R is an effective mechanism on incentivizing AEs to provide more quantity of reliable ram sharing and diminishing the influence of the harmful behaviors.