Blue: a Reputation-based Multi-Agent System to Support C2C in P2P Bluetooth Networks

In this paper we propose a multi-agent system, called Blue, providing a reputation mechanism to promote mobile C2C commerce in large and highly dynamic environments based on the Bluetooth wireless technology. In such a scenarios, detecting malicious users assumes a great importance but traditional approaches to obtaining reputation of a user are unfeasible or meaningless. For this purpose, we propose a centralized reputation mechanism, used in a asynchronous way, to manage users' reputation based on trade feedbacks (given by users) suitably weighted. Agents employ such a reputation mechanism to choose their trade counterparts trying to avoid malicious users. A number of experiments show the effectiveness of our proposal.