Incentivising Resource Sharing in Social Clouds

Social Clouds provide the capability to share resources among participants within a social network - leveraging on the trust relationships already existing between such participants. In such a system, users are able to trade resources between each other, rather than make use of capability offered at a (centralized) data centre. Incentives for sharing remain an important hurdle to make more effective use of such an environment, which has a significant potential for improving resource utilization and making available additional capacity that remains dormant. We utilize the socio-economic model proposed by Silvio Gesell to demonstrate how a "virtual currency" could be used to incentivise sharing of resources within a "community". We subsequently demonstrate the benefit provided to participants within such a community using a variety of economic (such as overall credits gained)and technical (number of successfully completed transactions) metrics, through simulation.