Trustworthiness as a Measurement Structure for Task Conformance in 6G Service Chains

Abstract

A 6G service crosses a chain of stages from different vendors, and its contract binds class-conditioned guarantees at the terminal interface: in the packet relay chain studied here, a priority class is owed a timely-delivery rate and a loss ceiling. We define trustworthiness as conformance of the delivered per-class distribution of outcomes to the contract and develop the measurement structure this forces. Two results fix its form: a discrepancy that treats outcomes interchangeably cannot express contract preferences, and no single expectation-valued score that determines the contracted terminal expectations can be carried from stage to stage once two or more contracted indicators remain independent at some stage. The minimal record is one signed number per independent contracted indicator, which the downstream design data carry to the terminal exactly; classical scalar trust models are the single-indicator case. The terminal deviation splits exactly into per-stage contributions. Transition logs at a stage estimate its contribution without reconstructing its full deployed behavior, a stage at its design behavior is flagged at most at a declared rate whatever traffic it receives, and the estimates bracket each stage's share of the terminal deviation at explicit confidence. In the three-relay chain, a relay that either deprioritizes premium traffic or has degraded capacity violates the same clause with identical contracted evidence: the transition audit localizes the relay in 300 of 300 windows and brackets its share of the deviation, and a diagnostic separates the causes.