Enforcing cooperative resource sharing in untrusted peer-to-peer environment

Abstract. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing is widely recognized as a promising paradigm for building next generation distributed applications. However, the autonomous, heterogeneous, and decentralized nature of participating peers introduces the following challenge for resource sharing: how to make peers profitable in the untrusted P2P environment? To address the problem, we present a self-policing and distributed approach by combining two models: PET, a personalized trust model, and M-CUBE, a multiple-currency based economic model, to lay a foundation for resource sharing in untrusted P2P computing environments. PET is a flexible trust model that can adapt to different requirements, and provides the solid support for the currency management in M-CUBE. M-CUBE provides a novel self-policing and quality-aware framework for the sharing of multiple resources, including both homogeneous and heterogeneous resources. We evaluate the efficacy and performance of this approach in the context of a real application, a peer-to-peer Web server sharing. Our results show that our approach is flexible enough to adapt to different situations and effective to make the system profitable, especially for systems with large scale