Although cooperation generally increases the amount of resources available to a community of nodes, thus improving individual and collective performance, it also allows for the appearance of potential mistreatment problems (i.e., a node's cost to perform a task becoming worse with cooperation than without) through the exposition of one node's resources to others. We study such concerns by considering a group of independent, rational, self-aware nodes that cooperate using on-line caching algorithms, where the exposed resource is the storage at each node. Motivated by content networking applications -- including web caching, CDNs, and P2P -- in this project we extend previous work on the off-line version of the problem, which was conducted under a game-theoretic framework, and limited to object replication.

Main Results