An Agent-Based Approach for Trustworthy Service Location

Abstract

We view the Internet as supporting a peer-to-peer information system whose components provide services to one another. The services could involve serving static pages, processing queries, or carrying out transactions. We model service providers and consumers as autonomous agents. Centralized indexes of the web are replaced by individual indexes kept by the agents. The agents can cooperate with one another. An agent may provide a service to another agent or give a referral that leads it in the right direction. Importantly, the agents can judge the quality of a service obtained and adaptively select their neighbors in order to improve their local performance. Our approach enables us to address two important challenges. One, in contrast with traditional systems, finding trustworthy parties is nontrivial in open systems. Through referrals, agents can help one another find trustworthy parties. Two, recent work has studied the structure of the web as it happens to have emerged mostly through links on human-generated, static pages. Whereas existing work takes an after-the-fact look at web structure, we can study the emerging structure of an adaptive P2P system as it relates to the policies of the members.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant ITR-0081742. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. We thank the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.