Distributed ledger technology for trust management optimisation in M2M

Decentralised environments with a high number of end-users and M2M devices used in several M2M services increase the importance of a secure trust management and comprehensive trust evaluation system to avoid frauds from malicious nodes. Blockchain, as part of the distributed ledger technology (DLT), helps to improve the overall security in a decentralised M2M community in various aspects. This research publication summarises several existing trust management and evaluation approaches, concluding with their benefits and limitations. Besides these, it highlights the advantages of the distributed ledger technology with the focus on blockchain and consensus mechanisms. In this context, most relevant consensus mechanisms are reviewed and an optimisation concept is proposed. Finally, a blockchain-based trust evaluation system is presented which can be used for trust evaluation and computation of decentralised M2M services part of an M2M community.