A Preliminary Review on Mobile Users Trust-based Recommendation Systems

Trust is the firm belief in the reliability, honesty, or ability of someone or something. However, in the era of the internet, we can argue that trust has eluded a proper definition. Consumers depend on services provided by service providers, which are in turn, dependent on the services provided by other service providers. The nature of interoperability of various services makes it difficult for consumers to have adequate knowledge of the dependencies of those services, which may not have any kind of security or Quality of Service (QoS) guarantee. The problem is compounded by the proliferation of various microservice-based models being utilized for interoperability. This paper is our first attempt to understand the issue of trust in the era of microservices. We reviewed relevant studies on both subjects (trust and microservices) to understand how trust models have been developed and implemented over the last 10 years. Our findings show that whilst service recommendation is maturing, trust management has not been thoroughly studied. Understanding of trust still remains vague due to the ambiguity of the concept of trust as well as the existence of divergent trust models in different contexts. Since microservice architecture is becoming a critical area to be studied in the area of service recommendations, and is a promising new architecture for trust management and future service-based implementation, this study is headed towards that direction.