RACOON++: A Semi-Automatic Framework for the Selfishness-Aware Design of Cooperative Systems

International audienceA challenge in designing cooperative distributed systems is to develop feasible and cost-effective mechanisms to foster 7 cooperation among selfish nodes, i.e., nodes that strategically deviate from the intended specification to increase their individual utility. 8 Finding a satisfactory solution to this challenge may be complicated by the intrinsic characteristics of each system, as well as by the 9 particular objectives set by the system designer. Our previous work addressed this challenge by proposing RACOON, a general and 10 semi-automatic framework for designing selfishness-resilient cooperative systems. RACOON relies on classical game theory and a 11 custom built simulator to predict the impact of a fixed set of selfish behaviours on the designer's objectives. In this paper, we present 12 RACOON++, which extends the previous framework with a declarative model for defining the utility function and the static behaviour of 13 selfish nodes, along with a new model for reasoning on the dynamic interactions of nodes, based on evolutionary game theory. We 14 illustrate the benefits of using RACOON++ by designing three cooperative systems: a peer-to-peer live streaming system, a load 15 balancing protocol, and an anonymous communication system. Extensive experimental results using the state-of-the-art PeerSim 16 simulator verify that the systems designed using RACOON++ achieve both selfishness-resilience and high performance