Trust Management and Modeling Techniques in Wireless Communications

Trust management is an emerging technology to facilitate secure interactions between two communicating entities in distributed environments where the traditional security mechanisms are insufficient due to incomplete knowledge about the remote entities. With the development of ubiquitous computing and smart embedded systems, new challenges and threats come up in a heterogeneous environment. Trust management techniques that depend on a centralized server are not feasible in wireless peer-to-peer communication networks. Hence, the trust management and modeling strategies are becoming increasingly complex to cope with the system vulnerabilities in a distributed environment. The aim of this chapter is to have a thorough understanding of the trust formation process and the statistical techniques that are used at different stages of the trust computation process. The functional components of a trust management framework are identified and some of the existing statistical techniques used in different phases of the trust management framework are analyzed.

A Reusable Agent-Based Framework for Smart Embedded Systems

Embedded computing systems still remain one of the underlying priorities in worldwide research communities. This paper presents an agent-based approach for embedded real-time systems design based on a reusable framework. The essence of our work lies on smart environment domain. Jade - a Java-based middleware is selected as a platform, facilitating the development of multi-agent embedded systems framework. Generic system architecture, framework prototype implementation and, subsequently, smart refrigerator control application are demonstrated, reasoning that the proposed method is effective in dealing with challenges raised by issues in contemporary embedded system development.