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Reciprocal resource sharing in P2P environments

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems enable users to share resources in a networked environment without worrying about issues such as scalability and load balancing. Unlike exchange of goods in a traditional market, resource exchange in P2P networks does not involve monetary transactions. This makes P2P systems vulnerable to problems including the free-rider problem that enables users to acquire resources without contributing anything, collusion between groups of users to incorrectly promote or malign other users, and zero-cost identity that enables nodes to obliterate unfavorable history without incurring any expenditure. Previous research addresses these issues using user-reputation, referrals, and shared history based techniques. Here, we describe a multi-agent based reciprocity mechanism where each user's agent makes the decision to share a resource with a requesting user based on the amount of resources previously provided by the requesting user to the providing user and globally in the system. A robust reputation mechanism is proposed to avoid the differential exploitations by the free-riders and to prevent collusion. Experimental results on a simulated P2P network addresses the problems identified above and shows that users adopting the reciprocative mechanism outperform users that do not share resources in the P2P network. Hence, our proposed reciprocative mechanism effectively suppresses free-riding.