The Impact of Churn on Uncertainty Decay in P2P Reputation Systems

Abstract

Reputation systems rely on historical information to account for uncertainty about users' intention to cooperate, but accumulating experience over long time periods is challenging in many situations. In peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, this operation is particularly hard due to churn-the continuous process of node arrival and departure. Key issues here include how churn impacts newcomers' perceptions and which key factors result in a slowing of uncertainty decay. New research explores these issues, and experimental results show the impact of churn on uncertainty reduction.