LAUSR

A federation of heterogeneous testbeds, which provides a wide range of services, attracts many experimenters from academia and industry to evaluate novel future Internet architectures and network protocols. The candidate experimenter reserves the appropriate testbeds’ resources based on various diverse criteria. Since several testbeds offer similar resources, a trust mechanism between the users and the providers will facilitate the proper selection of testbeds. This paper proposes a fuzzy reputation-based trust framework that is based on a modification of the fuzzy VIKOR multi-criteria decision making method and combines the user’s opinion from previously-conducted experiments with retrieved monitoring data from the utilized testbeds, in order to quantify the reputation of each testbed and the credibility of the experimenter. The proposed framework can process various types of numeric and linguistic data in an on-line fashion and can be easily extended for new types of testbeds and services. Data from active federated testbeds are used to evaluate the performance of the fuzzy reputation-based trust framework under dynamic conditions. Furthermore, a comparison of the proposed framework with another existing state of the art trust framework for federated testbeds is presented, and its superiority is demonstrated.