An economic incentive model for encouraging peer collaboration in mobile-P2P networks with support for constraint queries

Abstract

In mobile ad hoc peer-to-peer (M-P2P) networks, economic models become a necessity for enticing non-cooperative mobile peers to provide service. M-P2P users may issue queries with varying constraints on query response time, data quality of results and trustworthiness of the data source. Hence, we propose ConQuer, which is an economic incentive model for the efficient processing of constraint queries in M-P2P networks. ConQuer also provides incentives for peer collaboration in order to improve data availability. The main contributions of ConQuer are three-fold. First, it uses a broker-based economic M-P2P model for processing constraint queries via a Vickrey auction mechanism. Second, it proposes the CR*-tree, a dynamic multidimensional R-tree-based index for constraints of data quality, trust and price of data to determine target peers efficiently. The CR*-tree is hosted by brokers, who can sell it to other peers, thereby encouraging the creation of multiple copies of the index for facilitating routing. Third, it provides incentives for peers to form collaborative peer groups for maximizing data availability and revenues by mutually allocating and deallocating data items using royalty-based revenue-sharing. Such reallocations facilitate better data quality, thereby further increasing peer revenues. Our performance study shows that ConQuer is indeed effective in answering constraint queries with improved response time, success rate and data quality, and querying hop-counts.