An Equity-Based Incentive Mechanism for Decentralized Virtual World Content Storage

Virtual worlds have become the arena for many entertainment, social, and business activities and provided a platform for user content generation. To protect user innovation, persistency is an important property. Unfortunately, existing virtual worlds, owned by some entities, are not immune from death due to entity failure. To provide a persistent virtual world, a decentralized architecture is explored, which is constructed on user contributed devices. However, there are many challenges to realize a decentralized virtual world. One important issue is user cooperation in reliable content storage. The devices contributed by users may not be reliable for maintaining all user contents, but users do not have the incentive to provide reliable devices for others. This paper addresses the issue by two steps. First, an indicator is provided to users, called replica group reliability which is based on the proposed replicability index. Based on the indicator, users can learn the reliability of their content storage. Then, a new user incentive mechanism, called equity-based node allocation strategy, is proposed to promote user cooperation to collectively maintain reliable content storage. A decentralized algorithm implementing the strategy is designed and the evaluation results show its effectiveness and efficiency.