On Reciprocal Altruism and Its Application to QoS

With the growing usage of the Internet for resource-intensive applications e.g., streaming multimedia, best-effort service has ceased to be adequate. The result has been a spurt of proposals for guaranteed quality-of-service (QoS). Since network resources can be but limited, supply very often falls short of demand, thereby leading to competition to secure available resources. The factors that come into play in such situations, are network mechanisms, as well as complex economic behavior. A framework for providing cost-effective QoS needs to address both these aspects. Selfishness as a guiding motivation for action is widely observed in nature and has also been applied to QoS in the form of approaches based on competitive game theory. However, as has been observed in the natural world, long-term selfish motives may also give rise to apparently altruistic actions. This notion is well-captured in the phenomenon of Reciprocal Altruism, and has been modeled in game theory as the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. We propose Reciprocal Altruism as the guiding principle for a QoS framework that allows for cooperation between otherwise competing flows, leading to long-term benefit for all. We also present simulation results to validate the notion that cooperation can lead to better end-user experience.