Subject: [domainrep] Drafting a new use-case: information dissemination ?

From: Johan Pouwelse <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2011 00:24:21 +0200

Dear All,
At the 81th IETF BoF I've volunteered to contribute to the hopefully
soon-to-be WG REPUTE.

Hopefully this mailinglist can provide me with some feedback on the
braindump below. Is it useful to expand this?
My research team has running code, used by a few thousand people
related to this use case.
At some point we would love to contribute this (provided the
WG+charter is ready for this).
This email can hopefully combined with others in a "Survey of Proposed
Use Cases for REPUTE".

Proposed use case: information dissemination

We define information dissemination broadly as:
"the act of forwarding, relaying, caching and broadcasting packets of
data towards others".
We use the label "information dissemination" in a very general way deliberately.
This enables us to create a common framework for four use case
instances, each of which are used by millions of Internet users.
Disseminating information requires several type of resources such as
storage, networking and computation.

Problem outline: this REPUTE use case enables participants to spent
their valuable resources only
on those people which are most likely not "bad actors". This promotes
good behaviour, enhances performance and
provides increased social welfare in general.

This use case is focussed on collaborative and self-organising systems
where the users share resources freely.
We target the following four use case instances:
 1) open wifi base station - exchanging information between the
wireless and wired domain.
 2) Packet forwarding - Relaying packets in an Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET)
 3) Caching proxy - Relaxing information for others in order to
enhance performance and privacy on the wired Internet
 4) file sharing - pooling storage capacity together in order to build
a vast archive of content

Commonality between the four instances is that without REPUTE there is
no mechanism to
make an assessment of the trustworthiness of others. Every participant
in the above use case instances
MUST use REPUTE to determine if it should honour the request for resource usage.
We define the reputation of an identifier or "value" in this use case:
the reputation score reflects to which extend this identity has engaged in a
cooperative manner in the information dissemination ecosystem.
Therefore, only participants with a sufficient REPUTE value will see their
information dissemination requests fulfilled.
Leechers get degraded performance, get delayed before service or will
not obtain any service.

REFS
Our work in the area of a fully self-organising reputation system for
file sharing:
   "Improving Accuracy and Coverage in an Internet-Deployed Reputation
Mechanism"
   http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/P2P.2010.5569965
Detailed analysis of 25 proposed reputation systems (my claim is that
many of these designs are flawed)
   http://projects.cerias.purdue.edu/ds2/papers/reputation_survey.pdf

Again, looking forward to your responses...

Greetings,
Johan Pouwelse