Trustworthy Group Making Algorithm in Distributed Systems.

Submitted By: Nadia Zehra, BD761363, Group A

Introduction:
Group Communication is a necessary task to be performed in distributed environment in the
domain of peer-to-peer (p2p) systems. In p2p applications various heterogeneous systems
perform a special task in. In most of the cases the outcome or result depends upon accurate
performance of each peer in the group. Therefore the concern lies in choosing those peers who
are reliable and trustworthy.
The characteristics of p2p systems are that there is no central commanding authority or server,
all the peers are autonomous and are independent. Each of them has to perform their
designated task(s) like distributed computation, file services, message passing, decision making
or Computer Supported Cooperative Work. In such scenario the fault tolerance level is
sometimes crucial i-e faulty peer can join un-noticed and can damage the performance.
So the key concept described in this paper is to choose the most trustworthy peers prior to
assigning any group task to them. To achieve this, an algorithm is designed to calculate
trustworthiness of peers and the consistent ones are included in the group. Apart from that
message passing in group communication is controlled by passing messaged to trusty peers that
is called as TBB algorithm. This cuts off message flooding to quite an extent. First we will discuss
how trust-level is calculated among peers for group making. Then TBB algorithm in detail.

Trustworthiness of Peers:
A peer calculated trustworthiness of its acquainted peers i-e the peers with whom it can
directly communicated. Consider according to Fig1: a peer Pr wants to calculate the trust
scenario of peer Pi which is a direct neighbor of it. The communication between the two can
determine the level of confidence among the two. But this is a one dimensional approach to
see the picture. As a whole the peer might not be able to communicate with other members
with same high level.
So the technique peer Pr uses is to consider the mutual neighbors of both of them. Pr knows its
neighbors and the neighbors of Pi as well. So the mutual neighbors of Pr and Pi are:
N (Pr) N (Pi) = Pj, Pk

TrPi=Trustworthiness of Pi calculated by Pr
Pr takes into account selective trustworthiness of the mutual neighbors with Pi which is equal
to successful transmissions divided by total transmission of the particular neighbor with Pi.
Then it takes as average of Selective trustworthiness of all of the mutual neighbors.
For e.g. selective trustworthiness of Pj of Pi is calculated as:
STj (pi) =sTj(pi)/tTj(pi)
The total trustworthiness is calculated as:
Tr (pi) =

pkTN (pr)-{pi} STk (pi)/|TN (pr)-{pi}|

Where k= {0, 1, 2, 3} the mutual peers excluding the target peer Pi whose trustworthiness has
to be calculated.
Now consider the situation where trustworthiness of a neighbor who is not a direct neighbor
has to be calculated. In that case transitive trustworthiness is calculated. This is a product of
trust value of one mutual peer and the trust value that mutual peer holds of the target peer.
Tr (Pi)
Pr

Ti (Pj)
Pi

Pj

Fig2: Transitive trustworthiness

In Fig2, Pj is not a direct neighbor of Pr. So Pr calculates the Tr (Pj) as transitive trustworthiness
which is:

TTr (Pj) =Tr (Pi).Ti (Pj)

Creation of a Trustworthy Group:

When a peer wants to create a group, it is termed as initiator peer. It starts seeding the idea of
including trustworthiness by calculating trustworthiness of its neighbors the way explained
earlier. The following steps are included to make this procedure work:
1. The initiator peer decides :
a. Scale S of the group which is the size of Group G
b. A trustworthiness requirement treq.
2. The initiator selects the most trustworthy peer in the G which are =>treq.
3. If S is satisfied then Group Created.
4. Else the initiator say Pi asks its neighbors to introduce their trustworthy neighbors that
satisfy the initial requirement to it.
5. If Scale is satisfied then Group created, else the group creation fails.

Fig 3
In the above Fig3 Pi wants to start a group G. So as an initiator it takes treq=5. Among its
neighbors P01, P02, P03 qualify to be trustworthy. But scale of group is not satisfied so it
ask it neighbor to introduce their neighbors to group so P10, P11, P12, P13P20, P21 are
added in group and group is created.

Trustworthiness Broadcast Scheme (TBB):

Multipoint Relaying Scheme (MPR):
One aspect of message passing in a network is pure flooding scheme where messages
are broadcasted to all peers and their neighbors. The flooding is a huge burden on
network due to message explosion.
The concept of MPR is introduced to reduce the number of duplicate transmissions. In
this scheme each peer knows not only the first neighbors but also the second neighbors.
So a peer forwards message to all its acquaintances but selects some of the peer who
forward it to next level. The peers who are selected to forward message are called as
relay peer and the ones who only receive the message are called as leaf peers. In this
way number of messages transmitted is reduced thus free the network bandwidth to be
utilized for more tasks.

Message broadcasting:
In order to broadcast a message to all peers in Group G the initiator peer selects the
peers which fall under some trustworthy requirement. These trustworthy peers then
forward the message to their trustworthy peers and so on till the Scale of Group
receives the message.
Based on this concept we can implement reliable message transmission and fault
tolerance in the group.

TBB algorithm:
A relay peer plays a critical role to broadcast message in a trustworthy Group G. The
Depth D of a group means how many times the message has to be sent to a particular
peer. Let P (D=h) means that peers receive message from imitator peer which are h hops
away.
Consider the example peer Pi wants to send message to 3 hop away neighbors then it
will first pass the message to one hop away neighbors who are most trustworthy and
are termed as relay peers which in turn select their own trustworthy peers and at D=2
and those relay peers send the message to their peers at D=3.
In the Fig 4 the peer Pi sends the message 3 hops away and in each level relay peers do
the job of transmitting the message.

Fig 4

Concluding Remarks:
By introducing TBB algorithm we make the peers choose a reliable path, reduce network traffic.
By implying trustworthiness concept for creation of group the p2p architecture is utilized to
make a reliable distributed paradigm with low threshold of faulty behavior.
By the combination of the above two scheme reliable and robust transmission of message
passing with secure credentials is introduced in distributed environment.