Crowdsourcing Mechanism for Trust Evaluation in CPCS Based on Intelligent Mobile Edge Computing

Both academia and industry have directed tremendous interest toward the combination of Cyber Physical Systems and Cloud Computing, which enables a new breed of applications and services. However, due to the relative long distance between remote cloud and end nodes, Cloud Computing cannot provide effective and direct management for end nodes, which leads to security vulnerabilities. In this article, we first propose a novel trust evaluation mechanism using crowdsourcing and Intelligent Mobile Edge Computing. The mobile edge users with relatively strong computation and storage ability are exploited to provide direct management for end nodes. Through close access to end nodes, mobile edge users can obtain various information of the end nodes and determine whether the node is trustworthy. Then, two incentive mechanisms, i.e., Trustworthy Incentive and Quality-Aware Trustworthy Incentive Mechanisms, are proposed for motivating mobile edge users to conduct trust evaluation. The first one aims to motivate edge users to upload their real information about their capability and costs. The purpose of the second one is to motivate edge users to make trustworthy effort to conduct tasks and report results. Detailed theoretical analysis demonstrates the validity of Quality-Aware Trustworthy Incentive Mechanism from data trustfulness, effort trustfulness, and quality trustfulness, respectively. Extensive experiments are carried out to validate the proposed trust evaluation and incentive mechanisms. The results corroborate that the proposed mechanisms can efficiently stimulate mobile edge users to perform evaluation task and improve the accuracy of trust evaluation.