A distributed reputation-based framework to support communication resources sharing

Improvements in computational and network capabilities of mobile devices along with the wide spread of wireless networks for smart cities, allow users to make accessible temporarily unused communication resources for free or for a fee. Such interesting scenario introduces, however, some critical issues due to reliability of users sharing/consuming resources which are a further concern with respect to those strictly referred to the security. To tackle such problems, in this paper we propose a distributed multi-agent framework, exploiting reputation information, which considers both the price paid by mobile users for resources and some countermeasures to detect malicious users, as confirmed by experimental results.