As part of the COREnext project, Wings ICT Solutions has developed and demonstrated an innovative Trust Evaluation and IoT Management mechanism – a digital component designed to optimise the deployment of workloads across Internet of Things (IoT) devices based on their trustworthiness. This work forms part of the project’s broader objective to create secure, adaptive, and high-performance digital infrastructures for next-generation communication systems.
The growing number of interconnected devices in modern networks creates both opportunities and challenges. While IoT devices enable smart and decentralised systems, they also vary significantly in reliability, performance, and security. To address this, the COREnext team designed a Trust Management Orchestrator capable of dynamically evaluating and assigning tasks to the most trustworthy IoT devices — ensuring secure and efficient operation across the network.
How It Works – Trust-Based Orchestration
The demonstrated solution organises and manages IoT devices across three computing layers — extreme edge, edge, and cloud, and follows a multi-step process:
- Clustering: Devices are grouped using the K-means clustering algorithm, classifying them into groups based on their operational characteristics.
- Trust Evaluation: A trust evaluation function calculates a trust index (ranging from 0 to 1) for each device class. Metrics include:
- Availability and reliability
- Security, data privacy, and integrity
- Energy consumption and battery level
- Network performance (latency, bandwidth)
- Multi-connectivity capabilities
- Orchestration: The Trust Management Orchestrator uses these trust indices to determine the optimal workload placement, ensuring tasks are executed on the most trustworthy and capable devices.
The system continuously gathers real-time performance data — including CPU utilisation, resource usage, and network metrics — and feeds it into an optimisation algorithm that adapts workload assignments dynamically.
Measurable Gains in Trustworthiness
To validate the approach, the team conducted extensive simulations comparing the trust-based orchestration mechanism against a standard load-balancing algorithm.
The results were clear:
- The proposed system achieved up to 53% higher trustworthiness in workload allocation compared to traditional load balancing.
- Larger device pools increased potential gains, as a greater number of trustworthy allocation options became available.
- Conversely, as the number of tasks increased, gains naturally decreased due to the limited solution space.
These findings demonstrate the significant advantages of trust-aware orchestration in distributed IoT environments, improving both security and reliability without compromising efficiency.
Towards Secure, Adaptive IoT Management
The Trust Evaluation and IoT Management component represents a key step toward enabling self-organising, secure, and efficient IoT ecosystems. By integrating dynamic trust metrics into resource management, the COREnext project paves the way for intelligent, autonomous digital infrastructures that can adapt to evolving conditions and maintain high standards of security and performance.