A Trust-Based Approach for a Competitive Cloud/Grid Computing Scenario

Cloud/Grid systems are composed of nodes that individually manage local resources, and when a client request is submitted to the system, it is necessary to find the most suitable nodes to satisfy that request. In a competitive scenario, each node is in competition with each other to obtain the assignment of available tasks. In such a situation, it is possible that a node, in order to obtain the assignment of a task, can lie when declaring its own capability. Therefore, lying nodes will need to require the collaboration of other nodes to complete the task and consequently the problem arises of finding the most promising collaborators. In such a context, to make effective this selection, each node should have a trust model for accurately choosing its interlocutors. In this paper, a trust-based approach is proposed to make a node capable of finding the most reliable interlocutors. This approach, in order to avoid the exploration of the whole node space, exploits a P2P resource finding approach for clouds/grids, capable of determining the admissible region of nodes to be considered for the search of the interlocutors.