Asian Research Thesis Index

Abstract

Trust has a signiﬁcant impact on our personal and business relations. It is noteworthy that in the era of things based services, people trust in various companies/organizations for per sonal and business purposes. They receive their services and consequently, ‘data including personalandbusiness’isaccessibletotheseserviceproviderswhichsometimesbringunde sirable results. An example of things-based services is remote health monitoring system. In this case also, the sensitive data is accessible to known and occasionally unknown entities. Since health-related services are life-critical, therefore, the quality of such services in term of trust should not be compromised, and the context of the services should be the same as required. Hence,itisfairlysaidthatmaintainingtrustintheenvironmentofthisdominating technology is a tedious task. Web of Things (WoT) simpliﬁes the development of things based services by providing an application layer. It is identiﬁed that the existing work focuses on building blocks of WoT architecture. However, the aspect of trust has got less attention in the area of WoT. Con sequently, this research proposes a WoT architecture focusing on Trust. It has ﬁve layers which are not like those layers deﬁned in the OSI (Open System Interconnection) model. Instead these layers facilitate i)in making things part of the cyber world with the help of the Web technologies, ii) monitoring and evaluating trust at a central trust management layer, iii) receiving and providing recommendations through social relations, iv) and help in dis covering and selecting the required services by managing their trustworthiness at user level. For trust monitoring and management, a methodology is introduced in which entities are evaluated on the basis of multi-criteria such as context and Quality of Service (QoS). For this purpose,severalattributesrelatedtocontextandQoSareidentiﬁedwhichcanaffectthe trust worthiness of the entities. Direct and indirect experiences are the sources of evidence of trustworthiness. Moreover, third-party recommendations are also considered. To complete these tasks, algorithms are also designed. The research also proposes a methodology for the identiﬁcation of service-related attacks which are carried out to malign the trust level of the entities present in the system. To validate the proposed architecture, a prototype is implemented which is for the real-time monitoring of a poultry farm in Pakistan. It demonstrates an instance of the architecture presenting the ﬁve layers of the architecture. The test results show the effectiveness of the architecture in maintaining the healthy environment of the poultry farm. In addition, to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed algorithms, two specially designed environments are implemented where two real datasets are used for experimental purpose. In the ﬁrst group of experiments, the algorithms for service discovery, selection, and ranking are tested along with query augmentation. In the second group of experiments, a classiﬁcation ap proachalongwiththeproposedalgorithmsisusedtoidentifyvarioustypesofattacksonthe basis of feedbacks. During two kinds of experiments, the proposed algorithms demonstrate their effectiveness in discovering and ranking the services. In addition, identiﬁcation of the attacks is also demonstrated. The results show that the system outperforms the existing re lated approaches in terms of the comparative analysis on the basis of performance metrics (such as precision, sensitivity, and accuracy) and parametric metrics (such as availability, interoperability, context-awareness, scalability, and QoS).

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