Enhancing P2P Cooperation through Transitive Indirect Reciprocity

The main objective of this paper is to introduce and show some results concerning a novel form of indirect reciprocity, called transitive reciprocity, extending an incentive mechanism for cooperation in P2P systems based exclusively on direct reciprocity, called the Network of Favors. We define transitive indirect reciprocity and show with the aid of simulation experiments its usefulness in certain scenarios where its absence might lead to a system collapse. Transitive reciprocity is thought for small and medium size networks, and for scenarios where repeated interaction among peers is more likely. In contrast to other forms of indirect reciprocity, it does not involve any issues of trust, resting exclusively on first hand knowledge acquired by each peer through direct interaction with other peers. The new mechanism will be implemented in Fogbow, a middleware that uses the Network of Favors to support the fair barter of virtualized computing resources in a federation of private Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud providers.