Accurate autonomous accounting in peer-to-peer Grids

Abstract

We here present and evaluate an autonomous accounting scheme that provides accurate results even when the parties (consumer and provider) do not trust each other. Our accounting scheme relies on the observed relative performance among the parties. It is totally autonomous in the sense that it uses only local information, i.e. there is no exchange of information between the parties. This allows for the deployment of the autonomous accounting without requiring any sort of identification infrastructure, such as certificate authorities. The no need of trust or sophisticated infrastructure make our accounting scheme a perfect fit for peer-to-peer grids, which aim to scale much further than traditional grids by allowing free unidentified entry into the grid. Our results show that the proposed scheme performs very close to a perfect accounting scheme whose implementation is infeasible in most systems, including those we target. Although our autonomous accounting scheme was developed to work with OurGrid, it can also be useful for other systems. The basic requirement to use our accounting scheme is that resource consumers must also be resource providers.