The Use of Reciprocal Trade as a Model of Sharing Resources in P2P Networks

Personal computers and mobile devices connected in network provide a great potential to build distributed applications which can explore a wide range of available idle resources. They are called peer-to-peer applications (P2P) and play an important role in the evolution of the Internet. Whereas P2P transactions already dominate the worldwide bandwidth it mostly consists of file sharing, leaving out memory, storage and computing power. Amassing the computational resources scattered in the Internet requires a compelling collaboration strategy. This paper presents a proposal of a P2P sharing resources mechanism, as well as a policy of negotiation based on barter economics. This model has the purpose of increasing the efficiency of P2P network and reducing its number of parasite members.