On the Impacts of Transitive Indirect Reciprocity on P2P Cloud Federations

Several P2P systems of resource sharing use cooperation incentive mechanisms to identify and punish free riders, i.e., non-reciprocal individuals. A widespread approach is to use the levels of reciprocity, either directly or indirectly, to decide the extent to which an individual should trust other partners. One restriction of direct reciprocity mechanisms is the inability to foster cooperation between individuals with asymmetrical resources or availability incompatibility. In this work, we evaluate the performance of cloud federations ruled by the combination of the well-known direct reciprocity with transitive reciprocity, a strategy that allows direct reciprocity mechanisms to deal with asymmetry between individuals, while still keeping the benefits of direct reciprocity. For this, we implemented a simulator of resource bartering in cloud federations and experimented it with workloads synthesized from traces of real systems. Our best results showed an average increase of 12.83% and 26.38% on the sharing level of the federation, in an optimistic but unrealistic mechanism setup. When configured in a feasible and realistic manner, the transitive reciprocity was able to increase the sharing level up to an average of 6.02% and 7.53%.