SLACER: a self-organizing protocol for coordination in peer-to-peer networks

Coordination between nodes in open distributed computer systems is a general problem that´s becoming increasingly relevant as massive peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are being deployed on the Internet. A major subproblem is establishing and maintaining cooperation between nodes. To solve this problem, we created a simple algorithm, SLACER (a selfish link-based adaptation for cooperation excluding rewiring). When executed in a P2P network´s nodes, SLACER self-organizes the network into a robust artificial social network (ASN) with small-world characteristics and high cooperation.