Opportunistic Bartering Of Digital Goods and Services

The vision of mobile personal devices querying peers in their environment for information such as local restaurant recommendations or directions to the closest gas station, or traffic and weather updates has long been a goal of the pervasive research community. However, considering the diversity and the personal nature of devices participating in pervasive environments it is not feasible to assume that these interactions and collaborations will take place with out economically-driven motivating incentives.

This dissertation presents a novel bartering communication model that provides an underlying framework for incentives for collaborations in pervasive environments by supporting opportunistic serendipitous peer-to-peer bartering for digital goods such as ring tones, MP3's and podcasts. Our bartering communication model relies on policy-defined collaborative strategies. To demonstrate viability and advantages of this innovative bartering approach, we compare and contrast the performances of two conventional, frequently employed, peer-to-peer interaction approaches namely Altruists and FreeRiders against two collaborative strategies that employ the Double Coincidence of Wants paradigm from the domain of barter exchanges. We examine these four distinct strategies and compare their performances in homogeneous and heterogeneous networks. We also examine the effects of adding InfoStations to these networks. For each of the strategies, we observe levels of gains and losses that nodes experience as results of the collaborative digital good exchanges. We also evaluate communication overhead that nodes incur while looking for possible collaborative exchange. Furthermore, this dissertation offers an in-depth study of the swarm-like inter-strategy dynamics in heterogeneous networks populated with diverse nodes displaying varying levels of collaborative interaction attitude. Further, the bartering framework is extended by incorporating value -sensitive bartering models that incorporate digital goods and content valuations into the bartering exchange process. In addition, the bartering model is extended by integration of socially influenced collaborative interaction that exploit role based social relationships between mobile peers that populate dynamic mobile environments.

Taken as a whole, the novel research work presented in this dissertation offers the first comprehensive effort that employs and models opportunistic bartering-based collaborative methodology in the context of serendipitous encounters in dynamic mobile peer-to-peer pervasive environments where mobile entities negotiate and exchange digital goods and content.