Data-driven Trust Bootstrapping for Mobile Edge Computing-based Industrial IoT Services

TL;DR

This paper introduces a data-driven, context-aware trust bootstrapping method for MEC-based industrial IoT systems, addressing key limitations of existing approaches and enhancing trust evaluation through knowledge sharing and real-world data validation.

Contribution

It presents a novel trust bootstrapping approach tailored for MEC-based IIoT, overcoming interaction and data sparsity challenges, validated with real-world datasets.

Findings

Effective trust bootstrap demonstrated on real-world datasets

Improved trust evaluation accuracy in MEC environments

Knowledge sharing enhances trust assessment robustness

Abstract

We propose a data-driven and context-aware approach to bootstrap trustworthiness of homogeneous Internet of Things (IoT) services in Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) based industrial IoT (IIoT) systems. The proposed approach addresses key limitations in adapting existing trust bootstrapping approaches into MEC-based IIoT systems. These key limitations include, the lack of opportunity for a service consumer to interact with a lesser-known service over a prolonged period of time to get a robust measure of its trustworthiness, inability of service consumers to consistently interact with their peers to receive reliable recommendations of the trustworthiness of a lesser-known service as well as the impact of uneven context parameters in different MEC environments causing uneven trust environments for trust evaluation. In addition, the proposed approach also tackles the problem of data sparsity via enabling knowledge sharing among different MEC environments within a given MEC topology. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we carried out a comprehensive evaluation on two real-world datasets suitably adjusted to exhibit the context-dependent trust information accumulated in MEC environments within a given MEC topology. The experimental results affirmed the effectiveness of our approach and its suitability to bootstrap trustworthiness of services in MEC-based IIoT systems.