Classification of reputation in peer-to-peer (P2P) communication

Trust between communicating peers is increasingly catching the attention of the research community. Several trust models and trust management protocols have been proposed to assist the task of establishing trust between communicating peers, all of which make use of reputation mechanisms. In the present literature on reputation, a classification of reputation does not exist. In this paper, we present a three dimensional classification of reputation for peer-to-peer communication. We validate our classification for reputation by drawing from the existing proposed trust models. Additionally, we show that the different types of reputation along the three dimensions are interrelated and cannot be treated in isolation.