Reputation-based Service Management and Reward Mechanisms in Distributed Cooperative Personal Environments

Personal Network (PN) is a person-centric, distributed environment of a person’s devices that provides access to personal resources and services regardless the location of the person. A Federation of Personal Networks (Fednet) is a group-oriented network of PNs. A Fednet is a pervasive and ubiquitous computing technology that enables the users to enjoy cooperation and promises exciting opportunities for different applications in various fields, such as education, healthcare, entertainment, business and emergency. Since each PN is associated with a person, i.e., the PN owner, the cooperation of the PNs reflects the social behavior of the PN owners, and therefore a Fednet can be seen as a social network of PNs. Trust and reputation influence the real-world interactions; similarly, using reputation as a metric for interactions between PNs is an interesting topic. In this Chapter, we look at the Fednets from the ’social’ angle and discuss how the Fednets can benefit from using reputation. We propose a reputation-based framework for Fednets and present ideas on applying reputation information for service management and reward mechanisms in Fednets to improve the quality of cooperation between the PNs.