Exploring the Catallactic Coordination Approach for Peer-to-Peer systems*

Abstract. Efficient discovery and resource allocation is one of the challenges of current Peer-to-Peer systems. In centralized approaches, the user requests can be matched to the fastest, cheapest or most available resource. This approach, however, shows scalability limits. In this paper, we explore the catallactic coor-dination as a decentralized economic approach for resource allocation in peer-to-peer networks. The economic model of the catallaxy is based on the self-interested maximization of utility and the negotiation of prices between agents. We evaluate the feasibility of our approach by means of simulations and com-pare the proposed system with a centralized baseline approach. Our results in-dicate that while in the catallacic approach the number of control messages ex-changed between the peers grows due to the negotiation process, its service provision rate is fairly constant in different dynamic environments.