Modeling and Evaluating Cooperation Strategies in P2P Agent Systems

Distributed computing is becoming a fundamental technology for information exchange and cooperation. However, for such a technology to gain wide use, it must cater to users who do not own sophisticated (hardware and software) platforms and permanent network connections. For such users, the recent Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing model has many advantages over classical client-server and web-based distributed models. However, the P2P computing model in its current form has a number of other limitations in the data exchange and the protocols it supports. To overcome some of these, we proposed an agent based P2P system model whose nodes are agents (Peer Agents). In this paper, we adopt the i* graphical framework to help the modeling and evaluating of Peer Agent’s cooperation strategies. Although, the highly dynamic nature of P2P networks complicates the evaluation procedure, we propose three possible evaluation criteria in order to characterize the best strategy related to a particular failure symptom.