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.