Incentivising Cooperation between Agents for Content Sharing

The performance of many emerging communication paradigms depend on high levels of cooperation amongst the peers in the network. Although an individual’s best strategy may be to selfishly consume resources without reciprocation, the optimal social performance requires agents in the network to behave in an altruistic manner. This paper considers a P2P data dissemination scenario, and applies an autonomic trust protocol that forms social network structures to incentive cooperation. Trust links are formed according to the simple criterion that ‘individuals seek to interact with others at least as cooperative as themselves’ and these links are used to prioritise the choice of peers to interact with. The success of the protocol is validated through a prisoner’s dilemma based simulation which uses the similarity of interest between peers to define pay-offs. While the variation in interests reduces the average payoff (per iteration) received by the most cooperative individuals, only the most ‘divergent’ and uncooperative nodes are heavily affected and ostracized from interaction by other cooperative nodes.