Using Blockchain for Reputation-based Cooperation in Federated IoT domains

The convergence of Internet of Things and Multi-Agent Systems also relies on the association of software agents with IoT devices to benefi from their social attitude to cooperate for services. In this context, the selection of reliable partners for cooperation can be a very difficult task if IoT devices migrate across different domains. To this purpose, we introduce the Reputation Capital model and an algorithm to form agents groups in each IoT federated domain, on the basis of the reputation capital of each agent, to realize a competitive framework. A further essential contribution consists of adopting the blockchain technology to certify the reputation capi- tal of each agent in each federated environment. To verify that the individual reputation capital of devices and, consequently, the overall reputation capital of the IoT community can benefit from the adoption of the proposed approach, we performed some experiments. The results of these experiments witnessed that, under certain conditions, almost all the misleading agents were detected. Moreover, the simulations also have shown that, by adopting our reputation model, malicious actors always pay for services significantly more than honest devices.