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Trust has a significant impact on our personal and business relations. It is noteworthy that<br/>in the era of things based services, people trust in various companies/organizations for personal<br/>and business purposes. They receive their services and consequently, ‘data including<br/>personal and business’ is accessible to these service providers which sometimes bring undesirable<br/>results. An example of things-based services is remote health monitoring system. In<br/>this case also, the sensitive data is accessible to known and occasionally unknown entities.<br/>Since health-related services are life-critical, therefore, the quality of such services in term<br/>of trust should not be compromised, and the context of the services should be the same as<br/>required. Hence, it is fairly said that maintaining trust in the environment of this dominating<br/>technology is a tedious task.<br/>Web of Things (WoT) simplifies the development of things based services by providing an<br/>application layer. It is identified that the existing work focuses on building blocks of WoT<br/>architecture. However, the aspect of trust has got less attention in the area of WoT. Consequently,<br/>this research proposes a WoT architecture focusing on Trust. It has five layers<br/>which are not like those layers defined in the OSI (Open System Interconnection) model.<br/>Instead these layers facilitate i) in making things part of the cyber world with the help of the<br/>Web technologies, ii) monitoring and evaluating trust at a central trust management layer,<br/>iii) receiving and providing recommendations through social relations, iv) and help in discovering<br/>and selecting the required services by managing their trustworthiness at user level.<br/>For trust monitoring and management, a methodology is introduced in which entities are<br/>evaluated on the basis of multi-criteria such as context and Quality of Service (QoS). For<br/>this purpose, several attributes related to context and QoS are identified which can affect the trustworthiness of the entities. Direct and indirect experiences are the sources of evidence of<br/>trustworthiness. Moreover, third-party recommendations are also considered. To complete<br/>these tasks, algorithms are also designed. The research also proposes a methodology for the<br/>identification of service-related attacks which are carried out to malign the trust level of the<br/>entities present in the system.<br/>To validate the proposed architecture, a prototype is implemented which is for the real-time<br/>monitoring of a poultry farm in Pakistan. It demonstrates an instance of the architecture<br/>presenting the five layers of the architecture. The test results show the effectiveness of the<br/>architecture in maintaining the healthy environment of the poultry farm. In addition, to<br/>demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed algorithms, two specially designed environments<br/>are implemented where two real datasets are used for experimental purpose. In the first<br/>group of experiments, the algorithms for service discovery, selection, and ranking are tested<br/>along with query augmentation. In the second group of experiments, a classification approach<br/>along with the proposed algorithms is used to identify various types of attacks on the<br/>basis of feedbacks. During two kinds of experiments, the proposed algorithms demonstrate<br/>their effectiveness in discovering and ranking the services. In addition, identification of the<br/>attacks is also demonstrated. The results show that the system outperforms the existing related<br/>approaches in terms of the comparative analysis on the basis of performance metrics<br/>(such as precision, sensitivity, and accuracy) and parametric metrics (such as availability,<br/>interoperability, context-awareness, scalability, and QoS). |
