Exploring the Catallactic Coordination Approach for Peer-to-Peer Systems

Efficient discovery and resource allocation is one of the challenges of current Peer-to-Peer systems. In centralized approaches, the user requests can be matched to the fastest, cheapest or most available resource. This approach, however, shows scalability limits. In decentralized models, the functionality of the system is often more important than achieving assignments which reduce its overall cost. In this paper, we explore the catallactic coordination as a decentralized economic approach for resource allocation in Peer-to-Peer networks. The economic model of the catallaxy is based on the self-interested maximization of utility and the negotiation of prices between agents. We evaluate the feasibility of our approach by means of simulations and compare the proposed system with a baseline approach. Our results indicate that while in the catallactic approach the number of control messages exchanged between the peers grows due to the negotiation process, its capability to provide services in a highly dynamic environment increases compared to the baseline approach.