An Incentive Driven Lookup Protocol for Chord-Based Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Networks

In this paper we describe a novel strategy for carrying out lookups in Chord-based peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, wherein nodes are assumed to behave selfishly. This is in contrast to the traditional lookup schemes, which assume that nodes cooperate with each other and truthfully follow a given protocol in carrying out resource lookups. The proposed scheme also provides efficient and natural means for preventing free-riding problem in Chord without requiring prior trust relationships among nodes. In addition, we evaluate the performance of Chord for providing routing service in a network of selfish nodes and prove that it has good structural properties to be used in uncooperative P2P networks

Cloud provider capacity augmentation through automated resource bartering

© 2017 Elsevier B.V. Growing interest in Cloud Computing places a heavy workload on cloud providers which is becoming increasingly difficult for them to manage with their primary data centre infrastructures. Resource scarcity can make providers vulnerable to significant reputational damage and it often forces customers to select services from the larger, more established companies, sometimes at a higher price. Funding limitations, however, commonly prevent emerging and even established providers from making a continual investment in hardware speculatively assuming a certain level of growth in demand. As an alternative, they may opt to use the current inter-cloud resource sharing systems which mainly rely on monetary payments and thus put pressure on already stretched cash flows. To address such issues, a new multi-agent based Cloud Resource Bartering System (CRBS) is implemented in this work that fosters the management and bartering of pooled resources without requiring costly financial transactions between IAAS cloud providers. Agents in CRBS collaborate to facilitate bartering among providers which not only strengthens their trading relationships but also enables them to handle surges in demand with their primary setup. Unlike existing systems, CRBS assigns resources by considering resource urgency which comparatively improves customers’ satisfaction and the resource utilization rate by more than 50%. The evaluation results verify that our system assists providers to timely acquire the additional resources and to maintain sustainable service delivery. We conclude that the existence of such a system is economically beneficial for cloud providers and enables them to adapt to fluctuating workloads

A Survey on Consensus Mechanisms and Mining Strategy Management in Blockchain Networks

© 2013 IEEE. The past decade has witnessed the rapid evolution in blockchain technologies, which has attracted tremendous interests from both the research communities and industries. The blockchain network was originated from the Internet financial sector as a decentralized, immutable ledger system for transactional data ordering. Nowadays, it is envisioned as a powerful backbone/framework for decentralized data processing and data-driven self-organization in flat, open-access networks. In particular, the plausible characteristics of decentralization, immutability, and self-organization are primarily owing to the unique decentralized consensus mechanisms introduced by blockchain networks. This survey is motivated by the lack of a comprehensive literature review on the development of decentralized consensus mechanisms in blockchain networks. In this paper, we provide a systematic vision of the organization of blockchain networks. By emphasizing the unique characteristics of decentralized consensus in blockchain networks, our in-depth review of the state-of-the-art consensus protocols is focused on both the perspective of distributed consensus system design and the perspective of incentive mechanism design. From a game-theoretic point of view, we also provide a thorough review of the strategy adopted for self-organization by the individual nodes in the blockchain backbone networks. Consequently, we provide a comprehensive survey of the emerging applications of blockchain networks in a broad area of telecommunication. We highlight our special interest in how the consensus mechanisms impact these applications. Finally, we discuss several open issues in the protocol design for blockchain consensus and the related potential research directions

Community Networks and Sustainability: a Survey of Perceptions, Practices, and Proposed Solutions

Community network (CN) initiatives have been around for roughly two decades, evangelizing a distinctly different paradigm for building, maintaining, and sharing network infrastructure but also defending the basic human right to Internet access. Over this time they have evolved into a mosaic of systems that vary widely with respect to their network technologies, their offered services, their organizational structure, and the way they position themselves in the overall telecommunications’ ecosystem. Common to all these highly differentiated initiatives is the sustainability challenge. We approach sustainability as a broad term with an economical, political, and cultural context. We first review the different perceptions of the term. These vary both across and within the different types of stakeholders involved in CNs and are reflected in their motivation to join such initiatives. Then, we study the diverse approaches of CN operators towards the sustainability goal. Given the rich context of the term, these range all the way from mechanisms to fund their activities, to organizational structures and social activities serving as incentives for the engagement of their members. We iterate on incentive mechanisms that have been proposed and theoretically analyzed in the literature for CNs as well as tools and processes that have been actually implemented in them. Finally, we enumerate lessons that have been learned out of these two decades of CNs’ operation and discuss additional technological and regulatory issues that are key to their longer-term sustainability

Model-based Simulation of VoIP Network Reconfigurations using Graph Transformation Systems

We address the modelling and validation of P2P networks with special attention for problems related to VoIP services, focusing particularly on Skype. We use generalised stochastic graph transformation systems and associated stochastic simulation techniques based on generalised semi- Markov processes

Identifier-Based Discovery in Large-Scale Networks

The design of any network mechanism that requires collaboration among selfish agents could only benefit from accounting for the complex social and economic interactions and incentives of the agents using the design. This chapter presents a broad treatment of the main economic issues that arise in the context of identifier-based discovery on large scale networks, particularly on the Internet. An “identified” object (such as a node or service), referred to as a player, demands to be discoverable by the rest of the network on its “identifier”. A discovery scheme provides such a service to the players and incurs a cost for doing so. Providing such a service while accounting for the cost and making sure that the incentives of the players are aligned is the general economic problem that we address in this work. After introducing the identifier-based discovery problem, we present a taxonomy of discovery schemes and proposals based on their business model and we pose several questions that are becoming increasingly important as we proceed to design the inter-network of the future. An incentive model for distributed discovery in the context of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and path-vector protocols in general is then presented. We model BGP route distribution and computation using a game in which a BGP speaker advertises its prefix to its direct neighbors promising them a reward for further distributing the route deeper into the network. The neighbors do the same thing with their direct neighbors, and so on. The result of this cascaded route distribution is a globally advertised prefix and hence discoverability. We present initial results on the existence of equilibria in the game and we motivate our ongoing work